Dear Mary-anne: How do we know if kids are ready for a sleepover?

QUESTION: 

What is the right age for a child to have a sleepover at a friend's house?

How do we ensure our child is safe while staying at a friend's house? And can you suss out what a family situation is by simply talking to the mother or father?

ANSWER:

Sleepovers matter to children. It's a chance for them to feel special, to experience other friend's lives and to feel grown-up enough to be away from their own safe environment for the whole night. What age, though? Some children happily wave goodbye to their parents at age 4, and others are still ringing and pleading to come home at aged 10 – or later. Let your child guide you to start with. 

Some children really want to stay at their friend's houses but they just can't do it. Once the lights are out and the strange house wraps around them, they are desperate to get away. If you do pick them up, your child learns to trust that you're available and may then feel secure enough to stay the whole night another time. However, there's always a flip side to this and you don't want your child calling at 3am to say their pillow's a bit hard or there's a noise outside.  

You could start by having the sleepovers at your house. Let your child observe other children bringing soft toys, or saying goodnight to their parents from your house. Make the mornings especially fun.

You can gain some insights into the environment your child will be sleeping in, from talking to the host parents but this gets harder as the children get older. Sometimes, vulnerable children are so grateful to be invited somewhere, they unwittingly step into traps. If the group sleeping over is too big, your child could be a target for bullies.

One rule of thumb is to trust your instincts. Back yourself to say no – if it feels wrong, it probably is. There's also the concern that some houses may have no internet control at all. This brings its own set of problems for children of all ages so ask the parents straight up what their policy is. Perhaps make a cellphone available to your child to use if the family are strangers to you. It's especially tough when children move to a new area and you don't have the history of long friendships to fall back on. 

There's plenty of good learned from a successful sleepover, but there's irreparable damage done from a bad one, so you're right to be cautious.