The new rules for hosting a children’s sleepover

Detailed summary

For children, the thought of being able to sleepover with their friends is wildly exciting. Not so much for the parents ...

Have you heard the one about the sleepover where a couple of Year 6 boys climbed out a bedroom window and hopped on a night bus across London? Or the sleepover birthday party where 10-year-olds kept chatting until 3am but by then the host mum had fallen asleep on the landing? Similar tales abound in most neighbourhoods. I always feel for the children who are taken home in their pyjamas at 11pm after a sudden pang of homesickness.

It’s no wonder that most parents steel themselves before hosting a sleepover. But might these all-nighters – formerly a rite of passage in childhood – be fading out? Kate Pattison, former teacher and founder of AlphaBites, a podcast and Substack about Gen Alpha (those currently aged between one and 16), asked parents what they thought of sleepovers. Some 83 per cent said they didn’t like them at all, while 17 per cent did like them – as long as they were hosting.

Pattison herself, whose 10-year-old and seven-year-old are both sleepover fans, believes less is more since hosting seven children for her daughter’s 10th birthday: “They started to go to sleep at midnight and some were still awake at 2am. I had to get really cross. I won’t do a big group again.”

My children started talking about sleepovers from the age of three, thanks to Peppa Pig, but they’ve remained a much smaller part of my children’s life than they were in my childhood. My daughter Astrid, nine, has had a handful of sleepovers while my son Xavi, seven, is yet to have a friend overnight.

For Tejal Patel’s family, who live in North Harrow, sleepovers are a firm no, much to her 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son’s dismay. Patel, who works as a coach for perimenopausal women, says many women she’s coached have talked to her about sexual abuse at sleepovers.

“I have one chance to raise my children safely,” she says. “If something goes wrong, I can’t turn back time and therapy isn’t a fix-all. I want to control the controllable.

Sleep consultant Rosey Davidson, who has a 13, 10…

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