No Sleepovers Allowed

I just read an article called Why My Family Doesn't Do Sleepovers by Tim Challies and I completely agree with it. I was never allowed to sleepover at anyone's house. Even when I would come home from college for a weekend, my parents would look at me like I had three heads if I mentioned the idea of staying at someone else's house for the night. As a kid I thought it was unfair that everyone else had sleepovers but I was never allowed to participate. I felt like it made me weird or made my parents weird because we didn't follow the societal norm of sleepovers. My parents did allow my friends to sleepover at my house but I was never allowed out. My friends thought that was unfair that they could sleep at my house but I couldn't sleep at theirs. How could I explain why my parents were so overprotective? As a child I didn't fully understand why my parents were so scared to let me out of their sights for a night. What is the big deal? Well let me tell you, as an adult, I can honestly say maybe my parents should have been even stricter. They were trying to protect me from something I couldn't even imagine at that age. Child molestation is the biggest risk, but there are other less severe risks as well. Children are vulnerable and innocent, they don't realize all the ways in which their vulnerability can create issues and make them act in utterly foolish ways. But lets focus on the main risk - There is not a single benefit that can outweigh the risk of child molestation.

The reason for the blanket rule rather than a case by case analysis can be summarized by the statement Challies makes:

The reason we drew the rule so firmly was that it removes exceptions and explanations. [W]e did not want to have to explain to a family why we allowed our children to stay with others but not with them. 

Realistically it is easier to say no to all sleepovers than to try to explain why you feel more comfortable letting your child sleep at one person's house but not another's. Should you allow kids to sleepover at your house then like my parents did? Or should it be a two-way rule? No sleepovers regardless of whose house it is?

Challies quotes James Dobson, who wrote the book Bringing Up Girls (which I hope to read someday):

Until you have dealt with little victims as I have and seen the pain in their eyes, you might not fully appreciate the devastation inflicted by molestation. It casts a long shadow on everything that follows, including future marital relationships. Therefore, parents have to think the unthinkable in every situation. The threat can come from anywhere—including neighbors, uncles, stepfathers, grandfathers, Sunday school teachers, coaches, music instructors, Scout leaders, and babysitters. Even public bathrooms can be dangerous today…

As if that wasn't scary enough on its own, Challies gives his own list of threats:

As I got older I learned of several people I knew who had been taken advantage of during sleepovers, and it wasn’t a perverse father in most cases, but a predatory older brother or sister or cousin. Sometimes it was even the friend himself.

Now consider these statistics from this source:

Studies by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, show that:

• 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
• Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
• During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
• Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
• Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.

If that doesn't make you think twice about protecting your children better, I don't know what will. I know some will argue that we can't protect our kids from everything and having a sleepover in a protected environment with people you trust should not be something that is taken away from a person's childhood experiences. The only problem is, you will only realize how unsafe a situation is after something bad happens. Of course you trust your (enter any friend or relative), but what happens when you find out that person hurt your child? It is too late. You can never undo the pain and suffering a child experiences from being molested. NEVER. So why even take the risk?

All this being said, I know that child molestation is not something we can cure and rid the world of by not having sleepovers. No matter how much you protect your children, something could still happen, whether it is of this nature or something completely different. That's part of life and unfortunately there is only so much a person can do.

On a less serious note, I'm pretty sure my parents also had a secondary reason for never allowing sleepovers. If a kid is never allowed to sleepover, not when they are 5 years old, or 16, or even 21 in my case, they can't lie about where they are "sleeping over" because they aren't allowed to in the first place. My dad was young once even though he acts like he was never younger than 40. He knew the ways people (especially girls) lie to their parents and sneak around - and he was not having those shenanigans in his house.