I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, honestly, but the conversation at the next table was so comically familiar that I couldn’t help tipping back in my chair so as to hear it better. It was an extended two-person lament about one of the great banes of modern domestic life. It suffused me with fellow feeling. “… And the next day she’s a wreck!”
“Oh, the whole weekend is done.”
“Ruined.”
What causes such ruin and wreckage? Sleepovers. For reasons that are not altogether clear, children seem to have an inexhaustible desire to spend the night at their friends’ houses, or to have their friends spend the night at theirs — though sleep is usually the last thing anyone gets.
“We’ve tried to limit them,” one of the mothers was saying.
“Same here. I put my foot down. Only one a week!”
“And no more than one friend per sleepover. I’ll tell you, after the last time. …”
Sleepovers have become such an integral part of mainstream childhood that many children take it for granted that they will regularly stay at someone else’s house, eating junky kid-food, watching movies, staying up late, and coming down the next morning hollow-eyed and sleep-deprived to ask if the pancakes will be ready soon and can we watch cartoons?
“Once we had 14 girls,” the second woman said.
“No way!”
“Way. Nightmare.”
I’ve tried to explain to my own children that when their mother was a girl and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a sleepover was, if they could imagine it, a rare treat. In those Mesozoic days, though it’s all fading from folk memory, every household did not have a videotape machine, let alone a giant flat-screen TV. So there was no ritualized media experience, as there is today.
We might have run around chasing fireflies for a while after dinner, but pretty soon the grown-ups would send us upstairs and it would be lights out at, say, 9. We’d whisper until 10, conk out, and wake up refreshed.
That is not to say that we didn’t petition for more frequent sleepovers, back at the dawn of time. Sure, we wanted them!
But parents were different then. Broadly speaking, they didn’t think that children’s passion for late-night socializing should impinge on adult time. Sleepovers are a pain for most adults — they were then, they are now — and more parents in those days seemed willing to put themselves first.
Countercultural exceptions do exist today. I know several families that operate under strict no-sleepover policies, less to prevent the ruin of weekends than to preserve family unity. And last winter, after a grueling stretch of overnights, my husband and I put the kibosh on all sleepovers during the school year. It’s been heavenly.
I was just about to intrude on the conversation when one of the women jumped up.
“Oh, I’d better run! My son has friends staying over tonight and I need breakfast stuff.”
“Wait, I thought you said no more than one kid per sleepover?”
The woman laughed. “I know, right! But what can you do?”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
