My oldest is now 10. Last year, or maybe it was two years ago, he went to a sleepover birthday party as kids do. At the time, I didn’t think anything of the fact that he was the only boy on the invite list. After the party ended, I forgot it had even happened.

I was at another birthday party a few months ago where the topic was “that party with the boy sleeping over.” The parents were sagely nodding to each other, relieved that one girl just went for the movie and didn’t sleep over. According to the group wisdom, her parents had done well.

“Uh, yeah,” I finally said. “That one boy there was my son.”

I was surprised mixed gender sleepovers would be whispered-about elementary school scandal. I honestly don’t see the risk at that age. I can imagine what parents might be worried about, but really? They’re 8- and 9-year-olds. There are parents actively hosting the party. Nothing is going to happen. Especially in our town of Berkeley, Calif., known for its liberal social and political views, where almost all of these kids have been socialized to have friends of both genders. This town is supposedly liberal and woke. My son isn’t even thinking about crushes yet, let alone anything physical.

These parents were even more surprised when I told them my mom let me have mixed gender sleepovers … in high school. The positive socialization aspect of boys seeing girls as viable friends and not just as potential hookups are why my mom, and the parents of my friends, didn’t care about our slumber parties. They knew we were friends. I’m still friends with all of them today. If we’re trying to create a world where men treat women as equals rather than only as objects of desire, we need to drop the taboos we put on their social interaction. We need to let them be friends.

There’s more, though. All your fears about mixed gender sleepovers assume your kids are straight.

Same-sex sleepovers and assumptions

Whatever you’re worried about kids doing at slumber parties doesn’t magically disappear for LGBTQ kids. Every parent I know at our school would be fine if their kids were gay, but I wonder what that would mean for their views on slumber parties. It seems like an unexamined aspect of parenting LGBTQ kids. A lot of kids seem to know their orientation at an early age and, especially where I live, they are more likely to talk about or acknowledge the existence and validity of same-sex relationships.

So if your 8-year-old son tells you he’s gay, what do you do about slumber parties? Only send him to parties with girls? Or just with straight boys? Is either really a rational approach? Should you approach things any differently than you would with your cishet (cisgender and heterosexual) son?

No. The fact is, you should trust your children to be children. And if you don’t, maybe it’s time to examine how you’ve parented them. Have you contributed to oversexualizing your children in ways that you’re not aware of?

My other question is this: If people are worried about co-ed sleepovers at this age, what does my transgender child do? Attend only sleepovers with children of the gender they were assigned at birth or with their gender identity? What if the child is gender fluid? No sleepovers at all?

My hope is that my trans child can sleep over wherever xe’s invited. And I hope those invitations come from friends of every gender.

We need to examine our own filters and realize that our fears for our children don’t always align with reality. My young son isn’t a predator, and your young daughter isn’t a harlot. My 8-year-old trans child doesn’t have internet access and is not yet steeped in hookup culture. If xe’s hanging out with your son or daughter, xe just wants to play make-believe or maybe Candy Land. Kids are innocent, and we shouldn’t intrude on that with our own fears or misguided jokes about their relationships with people of other genders. If you’re really parenting your kids, you should be able to trust them to hang out with their friends no matter how they identify.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Santiago could never decide on a job so he endeavors to have all of them. He is a writer, teacher, sign language interpreter, rugby referee and stay-at-home dad. He writes about the intersections of family, sports and culture at An Interdisciplinary Life.

Mixed gender sleepovers photo: © nimito / Adobe Stock.

This sleepover extravaganza left a memory that lingered like a hangover. Turns out that staying awake all night isn’t what it used to be.

The cards were admittedly sloppy, competing as they were against time best spent on anything but; however, the sentiment therein was genuine and heartfelt, if not misspelled. That my youngest son, freshly turned to 11, didn’t balk for a moment when I suggested he write thank-you cards was immediately chalked as a victory in this scenario, whereas grammar and penmanship were the battles to be fought another day.

We were working on gratitude in the medium of manners, an art molded with squirming bits of putty, sketched from example and framed by context. Painful lessons may have their place, but this place was not one of them. This was thanks and happy tidings, the type of lessons that shape a foundation, and I never felt a doubt as he scribbled salutations in pencil, the eraser, apparently, ornamental. His attitude, a grasping of empathy with regard to one’s time and giving, was more than enough.

Or, it could be, I was too damned tired to put up a fight.

In theory, we were both still recovering from his birthday party, which was a sleepover extravaganza featuring 12 of his classmates — a dozen tween boys, plus my own two sons, turning our living room into a clown car — a memory that lingered like a hangover. This, despite his falling asleep before the last guest left the next afternoon, then staying that way for 17 hours. I, too, had fallen asleep earlier than normal in the sleepover aftermath, 7 p.m. on a Saturday; but while he had jumped out of bed, bounced straight to his basketball game, and then to the park for no apparent reason, I awoke like Sunday mornings long forgotten, to the bruising pain of a body beaten and a mind even more so. Turns out that staying awake all night isn’t what it used to be.

When I was a kid, staying up with my friends entailed countless video games, comic books and hoping to see someone naked on basic cable. As I got older, the hours shifted in emphasis to drinking games, discussing books and hoping to see someone naked on basic cable. These days, however, my drinking is less competitive, my books still being written, and I have HBO. I’m in bed by midnight.

They had YouTube.

The laughter from the darkness had me convinced that the only things separating my pillow from the living embodiment of William Golding’s words were a wall of wood and plaster, and a bookshelf full of distraction. Yet, upon my hourly trips down the hallway, it wasn’t “Lord of the Flies” that greeted me, but rather a yellow glow in the night, zapless, with a boy on the screen doing crafts in a mine, and 28 eyes upon it. Then I would return to my bed, wide awake, alone, and far too cranky, my wife having left hours earlier to sleep in the car so as to have something resembling rest before her 6 a.m. workday, and I spoke aloud the mantra of a sleepover parent: “I was a kid once. I was a kid once. I was a kid once.”

Then I tweeted it.

Finally, at 5 a.m., desperately hoping that our eyes might shut before the day yawned open, I took away the last of the electronics, gave one more menacing monologue, stern and steady, then retired again, aching and heavy with fatigue. The night was worn, my spirit weary, and it wasn’t long before the morning mocked us.

And we did.

It rained hard the next day, harder, in fact, than I have ever seen before. The boys gathered, badly rested and full of good humor, drying themselves in front of the fire after a wet morning in thick grass, plucking at guitars, petting dogs and cheering my son as he opened the gifts they gave him. Behind each there was a joke, a reason or a story, and it was that, a perfect storm of tweens, that he marked upon as he signed the cards to thank them, a smile hand-delivered or stamps for far relations. He wrote them there, warm and happy, a birthday blur at the kitchen table, still sticky with maple.

A few weeks ago, we planned a babysitting swap with some friends of ours.

They agreed to take our son, Detective Munch, for a night, all night, overnight!, so my wife and I could go out and pretend to be 20-year-olds again. More importantly, we could wake up and pretend to be 20-year-olds again. And then, a few weeks down the line, we would repay the favor. It seemed like a great idea.

This weekend, it was our turn. To take our friends’ two kids.

We didn’t think this through.

I’ve been to a lot of rock concerts. Been in sports arenas for dramatic playoff games. I’ve even been in the delivery room pre-epidural. Saturday night’s sleepover party may have been the loudest experience of my life. It seems incredible that three tiny humans under five years old could make so much noise, and maybe I’m exaggerating; PTSD makes one’s memory unreliable.

If you stacked these kids on top of each other, they’d barely be taller than me. And yet, somehow, they were louder than that Rage Against the Machine show I saw, and they were louder than the riot that ensued when the mosh pit got out of hand. And these are people who were having fun!

Thankfully, the kids get along; I can’t even imagine what the night would have been like if they didn’t like each other.

The sleepover non-sleepers

Detective Munch and our friend’s oldest son, Evel Knievel (the kid isn’t even five and he’s already gotten more stitches than I have in my entire life) are pretty much best buds at this point. They’ve known each other almost from birth, and since we’ve been back in Brooklyn (a year ago today!), they’ve really hit it off, thanks to a shared interest in superheroes, Star Wars, and ignoring their parents.

Evel had a kid brother, and over the past year, he’s become something of an honorary sibling to Detective Munch. My kid loves the little guy, and who can blame him? The Bobblehead is about the happiest, cutest kid alive, constantly toddling around, chasing the other kids, doing whatever they do and laughing the entire time.

The three of them together are basically the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. And the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. (If you were in Brooklyn Saturday night, I apologize for the tremors.)

We have neighbors below us who have a 16-month-old. We warned them about the apocalypse that was the forthcoming sleepover, and to help try to minimize the noise (for our neighbors and ourselves) we threw on a movie when it got dark, expecting the kids to sit still and watch. HAHA. Minimize the noise! HAHA. HAHAHAHA. Sit still! As if.

No sleep in Brooklyn

Eventually, we did get them to finally quiet down and go to sleep. We didn’t hear from our patient neighbors until 7 the next morning when I got a text requesting that we stop the running.

Yes. “The running.”

Inexplicably, after having gotten up before 6 a.m., my son and his sleepover friends decided to spend the pre-dawn hours sprinting up and down the hallway. I would have tried to stop such ridiculous behavior if

a) I understood it, and

b) I wasn’t terrified.

The amount of energy on display was so intense, I might have gotten radiation poisoning. You’d think kids would be tired after being up til close to 11 p.m. babbling at each other, or after continuously dragging bin after bin of toys from one room to another, or after jumping up and down on the couch and the floor and the bed, or after running around looking for hidden “treasure” (Magna-Tile pieces) my wife stowed away for them.

But no.

Despite our repeated attempts to wear them out, they were going strong from 6 p.m. Saturday until deep into Sunday. Detective Munch didn’t finally hit a wall until 3:30 that afternoon, after a weekend of tee-ball, multiple trips to the playground, a few hours at a little water park, an epic sleepover (emphasis NOT on “sleep”), a stop at the beach, a game of mini-golf, and countless time spent pretending to be superheroes and pirates and Transformers. And his two friends were there right along with him, for every excruciatingly loud minute.

(So was my wife, the MVP of the sleepover weekend, shouldering the lion’s share of the kids’ attention and devising new ways for them to focus their energy and enthusiasm so they wouldn’t spin into orbit. I mostly sat around and glared at them when they got too close to me.)

The sleepover is finally over

Somehow, my wife and I escaped unscathed, albeit in desperate need of some silence and sleep and maybe a Pulp Fiction-sized shot of adrenaline. And it was fun to host our first sleepover; I remember how much fun I had spending the night at a friend’s when I was a kid, and based on the happy noises that are still ringing in my ears, that doesn’t seem to have changed.

When he woke up this morning – after nearly 12 hours of sleep, which itself came after a rare, impromptu, two-hour nap)! – the first thing he said was, “I miss my friends.”

Awww!

“We can’t have a sleepover every night, kiddo!”

Actually, we can. So long as it’s at his friends’ house!

A version of this first appeared on Dad and Buried.

Photo: theloushe jump jump!! via photopin (license)