i think an important formative childhood/teenagehood experience is to go over to your friends house for a sleepover and realize some people's families are way more fucked up than yours
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
My mom would sometimes come home from work and thank my sister and I for being good but normal kids after hearing about her coworkers' kids. Goes both ways!
i was pretty fortunate that the most fucked up thing i saw at a sleepover was KETCHUP on EGGS. my eyes were wide as saucers throughout 😂
but in college i gained a true appreciation for how non-fucked my family was and how relatively rare that was 😞
I'm one of the no sleepovers people, but my guideline is that it's only until you're old enough for me to see that you understand it's okay to stand up to authority figures and I see that in action. until then, I'll happily stay up until 11/12/1 and pick them up to bring home.
You make a compelling point though! I was the kid that needed to see functional parents to know that I wasn't getting that at home.
I owe making it through my teens years to a best friends family for allowing me to stay there almost weekly.
I had the opposite reaction at sleepovers... I don't think anyone's Dad was as scary as my Dad growing up. My brother's friends called my dad a "silver back gorilla" in high-school
I stayed at a kid's house and found out she kept cheese puffs under her mattress and called them her "caca balls" and randomly ate them through the night.
Food wasn't allowed past the kitchen or dining room in our house. And there were no cheese puffs, ever. Ironically, I love cheese puffs now but eat them at the table for dessert with red wine 😄
My family was wealthy but deeply fucked up in ways they don’t show to the public. I hate them for constantly erasing my reality.
Couldn’t be patient. Couldn’t forgive a mistake. Weren’t even kind to me when I was sick which is where most emotionally inconsistent parents have a soft spot.
Forget going over their house; a few times the mother of one of my friends showed up at MY house to yell at her for forgetting to do some minor chore, and they'd have a screaming match on the front porch.
Couldnt agree more. As a kid in a Boston burb, the shyt I saw in friend's families was mind boggling. Made me forever appreciate my mom, who raised me alone, yet loved & raised a spoiled brat. Most of them friends are deceased or in jail. Saddens me. But did learn what not to do, for most part ;)
that freaks and geeks episode where lindsay has dinner with kim kelly's family and goes home to her parents who she is normally mad at (bc teenager) and just silently hugs them.... real
also works the other way i think, i feel like sometimes good parents sense when a kid doesn't have those and they go out of their way to be like "this doesn't have to be what the rest of your life is like"
just saw ppl arguing on twitter about whether it's reasonable to ban your child from sleepovers and i feel like it's probably good to screen the parents to make sure there aren't like, guns laying around, it's still good for kids to be exposed to a controlled amount of real dysfuncion
One thing I think about is that not everyone needs to have siblings to learn to get along but everyone should have FRIENDS with siblings as an early way to navigate “here’s someone I like or dislike or whatever but have to get along with” and I think that’s a similar thing
Yea, or like cousins/other-close-in-age family members they have to deal with on a regular basis. Lots of ways to get that kind of socialization that's not just siblings. Even neighborhood circles (back in the day when we played with the neighborhood kids, I guess??)
i think sleepovers are also some of the first exposure kids get to the idea of social class and the way that money affects relationships and quality of life beyond just having more or less toys or w/e
If you want to talk about being exposed to different social classes, growing up in the Hamptons was crazy that way. I went to school with the children of billionaires and kids whose families were on food stamps. It really made it so $ was not the metric by which you judged someone. 1/
but it still did skew your reality of what “expensive” of “wealthy” was. We did a game in Econ where everyone was given an income and had to budget their lives. They took these numbers from normal places in the US so it was like $45 etc. the MELTDOWN our class had insisting it was impossible to 2/
I graduated from high school in 1975. Half the students had parents in the Army - base was nearby. Vietnam was right in front of our lives. Some of my friends had lost their fathers there. Most of us were middle and lower middle class. A lot of different nationalities - I enjoyed the mix.
That was huge for me when we moved to NYC when I was almost 11. Prior to that we had generally been the same working/lower middle class as my schools and neighbors. In NYC, I was a scholarship kid at a private school and it was eye-opening to go to someone’s condo.
Also good when they aren't that dysfunctional. I was intimidated the first time I slept over at my best friend's house bc he lived in a trailer that smelled like cigarettes and ass, but his parents were very kind to me and loved their sons. I think it inoculated me against "scary poors" brain early
Gaah, takes me back man. My best friend in elementary school, I slept over at his house all the time. His sisters were fifteen years older than him and they kept multiple cages of ferrets in their rooms, so the house smelled like cigarettes and ferrets. We played with cap guns in the garage.
I grew up in an apartment building full of kids and some of us girls would sleep over each other’s houses. I agree it was good for me to be exposed to other family dynamics. Learned a lot about the type of person I want to be, and not be.
I remember being 6 and having a friend over who laughed at me when I cleaned up our toys, “I never have to do that!”
I was so jealous, until I went over to his house after school once. Newspapers and mail filled an entire room, old clothing filled another room to the ceiling. Total hoarder house.
My kids also never *HAVE* to clean up. We have clean up time where they can just do whatever, but we're looking at the house and cleaning it and they see us doing it and wants in. Idk how long this lasts but hopefully until they turn 10.
I used to go on the dad reddit when my kids were younger but that place is weirdly toxic. like a lot of them mean well but then it’s like “if you let your kids go to a sleepover you’re asking for them to be sexually abused” and I’m like… what
You know, I don't have kids. But if I did, I'd totally host another parent, to make the space feel safe enough. Super random, I know. But kids will grow up with controlled exposure to independence. OR with uncontrolled experiences that might happen as young adults.
I have a memory that sticks out when I was ~13 and went to someone's house and they had framed pictures of their kids everywhere. I asked my father's wife "why don't we have any school or family pictures hanging up?" "What for? We already know what you look like."
When Mr. Weir tells Lindsay to be more understanding because Nick's dad is a hard man, and she jokes that she knows what that's like, and he responds "No, Lindsay, you don't" with that dead serious look.
I didn’t know that my friend spent so much time at my house was bc her home life sucked so bad. She told me 20 years later when I was venting about my mom. I had some sleepovers there but I didn’t notice.
One other scene along that vein that I remember is when Joe Flaherty’s character is talking to Lindsay saying that his father was a hard man. Lindsay says “Yeah I know the feeling” and Flaherty’s response of “Lindsay’s you don’t.” was just chilling. Amazing performance in that little line.
These kids I went to school with who lived down the street, a girl a year younger than me was laughing and spilled a little soda on their carpet, and then froze in fear, and her dad ran in and spanked the shit out of her. I walked home shaking, and was SO glad my mom and stepdad weren't abusive.
When I was in high school I slept over at a friends house that was just stuffed w/ cig smoke and garbage everywhere, one bathroom would have been taped off if it was in a gas station and it had the working sink. My mom thought I had been blasting cigs when she picked me up. Nice mom and grandma tho
i still remember the kid who's mom was an absolute control freak and enforced an early bedtime for a friday night birthday sleepover! we were all like 14 and she made us go to bed and turn the lights out at 9:30.
and like total silence too, she was standing outside listening for us to make a noise
Oof that poor kid. I had a bed time (10pm) until I was a senior in high school and my BF pointed out that that was ridiculous and I need to put my foot down with my parents.
ohhh big time. hard mode: go camping at age 14 with your best friend and her parents who should definitely be divorced who ask your opinion about their arguments lmao
funny bonus: realizing as a child that you are definitely smarter than some adults. example: friends dad who took the colbert report at face value in 2008
I saw an instagram video with a peds ER doc listing 5 things they’d never do as a parent after working in an ER. One of them was she’d never let her daughter do a sleepover.
Now I’m not sure what to do because I don’t want to take away that childhood ritual.
Once had a sleepover with friends whose dad explicitly told my parents (my dad mostly) his current wife was a mail order bride, and that it was a good deal because she got citizenship and he would get another bride when they inevitably separate. My parents have been married for almost 50 years today
We were all horrified but his daughters (not by his current wife, obviously) were nice people (albeit some of their personal issues were immediately clarified to me) and it had been a long drive from our town to their house in West Palm Beach (natch) so the sleepover went ahead (it wasn’t just me)
my friends definitely got a taste of latent mental illness when I freaked out and had to be picked up by my parents each time I tried to sleep over somewhere
I went to a friend's one night, her family was devot evangelicals. As a family they watched Joan of Arcadia, (a pretty nondescript mainstream show) and when it was over her mom led us in a discussion about the "wrong lessons" the show imparted. I am still in shock thinking about it.
My parents were always pretty reasonable about media despite being very devout Christians, but it was *crazy* going to a friend’s house and discovering that he didn’t have a TV of any sort because his mom would find a problem with *anything*.
Veggietales was heathen because “tomatoes don’t talk.”
As far as I could tell, literally all she did all day was listen to Christian talk radio and seethe about everything “heathen”. His dad did all the cooking.
Covered butter dish on the kitchen shelf always. I don't like chunks of cold butter or torn toast.
Though butter I make at home does go in the fridge because I can't be 100% sure I washed it well enough to be okay at room temp.
It depends where in the country you are from. I grew up in the south where no but now I live in upstate New York, so yes. There’s about three days when I put the butter in the fridge in the summer.
Going to sleepovers taught me that quite a few kids I grew up with were speaking to their parents in a way that would have gotten me popped in the mouth. Also my friend Jed's dad showed off the metal plate in his arm before he took us to see Pokemon: The First Movie. He was a strange man.
This didn't really happen to me until I'd just finished high school and I'm glad it did because it made me a far more well adjusted adult basically just in the nick of time
Friends often stayed over after watching Saturday Night Live. 2 brothers and their cousin snuck in whiskey. We got wasted and watched SNL. My mom got wind of this and instead of the usual toast/cereal breakfast made us greasy bacon and runny eggs. The cousin barfed. My mom never mentioned it again.
When my sons were little they had day care in a home day care, and they were scandalized that the kids who lived in that house didn't say "please" and "thank you" to their parents.
I remember sleeping over at a friend's house because he had a Genesis. I woke up to go to the bathroom only to realize that the floor was covered in cigarette butts and dry dog poop.
The adult version of this is me getting insanely mad at my parents for their GWB-Republican era politics, complaining to a friend from Texas, and them revealing that their dad is in massive debt to QAnon grifters.
Hell, sometimes I get annoyed at how mainline centrist liberal my family is and have to stop and remember most of my friend's parents watch FOX news all day and I should thank my lucky stars!
My friends are all cool about it, but it's a helpful reminder when they're like "I literally never bring up anything remotely political around my family, ever."
I never had this experience, I actually realized I was being abused because my friends would go "what the fuck that isnt normal" when i'd tell them about an average night at my house
only child, went to a friends once where him and his sister literally did not stop screaming at each other/fighting from the second we walked in the door. real eye opener. never went back, obviously. my fragile ass could never.
Not necessarily ugh. It is nice to have such a wonderful haven, also to think back to later and it is good to know that the world is not as effed up as your family because it is easy to assume that that is normal, yes.
We've had a couple of sleepovers and our takeaway was that we eat healthily enough that kids who are on a more processed food diet have a hard time eating what we do because it has more real food in it.
I hope that was a helpful experience in food deserts and class war rather than a judgment on parents eating what’s cheap ♥️ but yeah it can be a massive difference
I think my parents screened my friends pretty carefully, but also, I really just didn’t have that many friends. My sister had more excitingly dysfunctional sleepover experiences. I was still at least exposed to different rules, expectations, and family norms at sleepovers.
It didn’t dawn on me for years that while I had sleepovers at friends’ homes (with varying levels of fucked up), I never had any at mine. I asked my mom why and she said, “oh, we never wanted to deal with anyone else’s kids.” Fair.
Comments
But I’ve read reddit. That’s when I saw how screwed up families can be.
but in college i gained a true appreciation for how non-fucked my family was and how relatively rare that was 😞
I owe making it through my teens years to a best friends family for allowing me to stay there almost weekly.
But also, sleeping over at fucked up people’s houses is how a lot of people experience their first SA.
I don't remember seeing an adult
We were twelve
Food wasn't allowed past the kitchen or dining room in our house. And there were no cheese puffs, ever. Ironically, I love cheese puffs now but eat them at the table for dessert with red wine 😄
Couldn’t be patient. Couldn’t forgive a mistake. Weren’t even kind to me when I was sick which is where most emotionally inconsistent parents have a soft spot.
It wasn't until I had a kid myself I realized oh hey my childhood was fucked up why would I ever do that to my child?
had one really fvked up or plain mean parent who bullied the spouse
and everyone who
came into their orbit.
"Life in pieces" too.
I was so jealous, until I went over to his house after school once. Newspapers and mail filled an entire room, old clothing filled another room to the ceiling. Total hoarder house.
Growing up I had some experiences like that that didn't fully click until later and it's turned into some really enlightening context
and like total silence too, she was standing outside listening for us to make a noise
Oy.
Oh. Oh, no.
Now I’m not sure what to do because I don’t want to take away that childhood ritual.
Bless them for what they do, of course, but only seeing the negative outcomes of fat distributions skews your perspective.
My personal experience was going to sleepovers and realizing my family was way more fucked up than yours.
Damn, that explains SO MUCH.
Like how many of the kids peed the bed was suspect at best.
Veggietales was heathen because “tomatoes don’t talk.”
Though butter I make at home does go in the fridge because I can't be 100% sure I washed it well enough to be okay at room temp.
Never asked to go back there ever again.
sincerely, someone with one borderline qanon parent and one actual-infowars parent (despite them being divorced??)
My friends are all cool about it, but it's a helpful reminder when they're like "I literally never bring up anything remotely political around my family, ever."
not their friends obv....
Going on sleepovers (which our mother despised) was one of the ways we escaped our own hellish household