Who can sleep at a sleepover?
Five giggly, chatty first-grade girls fell asleep in their sleeping bags on my living room floor around midnight Saturday. It was my daughter’s 7th birthday and her first sleepover.
In fact, it was the first time I have ever let her have friends to spend the night, having set the arbitrary age of 7 as the age to allow sleepovers when her older brother turned 7. So now that we’ve officially launched sleepover era in our house for two of my children, I’m wondering when all the rites of slumber party passage begin – prank calling, fingernail painting, toilet papering, truth or dare, commiserating over boys, etc. – all the things we did at one age or another during slumber parties when we were kids.
What do you think is the best age to start allowing friends to spend the night or sons and daughters to go spend the night with friends? At what age do sleepovers end? What rules do you set beforehand? How involved are you as a parent? (more…)
