Cancel Culture Comes for Sleepovers

A lmost any Millennial internet user will have been targeted by a meme that roughly says, “It’s Friday night. Mom just put Totino’s Pizza Rolls in the oven. Your best friends are sleeping over, and you will all play GoldenEye on Nintendo 64. Life will never be better than this.”

It’s not true, of course. The hedonic pleasures of staying up too late, mainlining Pizza Rolls with Mountain Dew, and passing out on the living-room floor are nothing compared to what most adults regularly arrange for themselves. And yet, nostalgia started to sneak up on me when the Washington Post informed me that sleepovers are now controversial among parents.

There are families for whom slumber parties are out of the question; in certain cultures, allowing your child to stay overnight with someone outside the family is not an accepted practice (many Gen-Z TikTok users have meme’d the awkward experience of turning down sleepover invitations because of wary parents).

Millions of parents post under the viral hashtag #NoSleepovers. They flock to parenting influencers and psychiatrists on TikTok who expound on various sleepover risks.

The reasons are multifarious:

As parents look to establish common ground with prospective sleepover hosts, the resulting questions — do you use parental controls for screen time? Do you own a gun? Are you vaccinated and boosted? — feel imbued with something more complex than a purely logistical checklist.

In other words, Americans no longer assume they share values with their peers in their actual communities. And so they continue to withdraw from one another into ever-more-elaborately curated virtual communities, where they nurture more refined suspicions of their neighbors. Their homes become little foreign countries unto themselves, with entirely unique dietary, sleeping, and media-consumption regimes. Being a helicopter parent now implies the duty to exfiltrate your child at 10:30 or midnight from a “late-over” rather than allow them the danger of a sleepover.

Negotiations with other households are just too exhausting. Parent 1: Oh, our child only eats Kraft Mac & Cheese, not homemade. He wants to bring his iPad and watch HBO Max. I let him watch whatever, LOL. Parent 2: Ah, well ours only eats Annie’s Mac & Cheese, or prepared food from Trader Joe’s. He uses his one hour of screen time to watch episodes of Octonauts that I’ve screened beforehand. Also, the third and fourth members of our polycule will be sleeping over with my spouse and me that night, is that okay? Parent 3: People still eat carbs from cardboard boxes? No wonder the frogs are turning gay. My child eats offal. I put him in blue-light-blocking sunglasses at 6:30 p.m. to help his circadian rhythm settle down. We shut off the electricity at the circuit-breaker box at 8 p.m. to avoid “dirty electricity.”

Sleepovers were a crucial part of the social ecology of my own childhood. They forced you to deal tolerably with another household’s routines and taboos, helpfully putting your own in perspective. It was just another one of those little, easy, horizon-expanding experiences. It was at sleepovers where I saw how brothers fight and still love each other, or found out what it might be like to keep a bird as a pet. There were other less-flattering glimpses into what other families were like. At the edges, the culture of sleepovers as a matter of course among so many of my friends provided weekend escapes or respites for children in unhappier homes, or adolescents who were suffering a strained relationship with their siblings or parents.

It’s actually a good thing for children to learn how to manage without Mommy for a night, or to get an idea of living to different standards, whether you perceive them as lower, higher, or just different. It’s good to learn what it’s like to sleep in a sleeping bag. Or how to say no to friends who try to pressure you into something stupid. Or how to ask forgiveness when they do and you do it. Or how to consume a meal you don’t like and express gratitude for the people who prepared it for you.

I remember sleepovers that started with games of GoldenEye on Nintendo and evolved into weirdly competitive chess-playing or thoughts of forming a band. Some of the friendships forged in them have lasted well into my adulthood — and now we make better meals than Pizza Rolls, too.

Americans need to make a practice of fearing each other less. The unvaccinated aren’t going to kill you. Extra screen time one night isn’t going to ruin your child. And your neighbor doesn’t just own “a gun” — he has an arsenal, meaning that in any sleepover gunfights, your kid will be roughly evenly matched. Get over yourselves.