Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My daughter’s (age 9) friends started inviting her for sleepovers about two years ago. We finally started allowing her to attend a few this year. Most recently, she attended a birthday slumber party with six girls!
Turns out one of the girls brought a bottle of prescription melatonin (high dose!) with her, and all of the girls took one. They all slept well, to say the least.
I was angry at the girl’s parents for giving their daughter an entire bottle of medication. But I was also really angry at myself for not having more conversations about scenarios like this with my daughter (we had one a few weeks before, but clearly it did nothing). I was already so hesitant to agree to sleepovers. How do I get comfortable with this? How do parents prepare their kids for an infinite number of situations as they get older? I felt like this was a total parent failure (mine and the other kid’s parents!).
—Parent Failure
Dear Parent Failure,
This is a tough situation, but don’t beat yourself up over it. I’m not sure I would’ve guessed, either, that a kid so young might have a full bottle of medication on them. But every household treats medicine differently, and not everyone is careful. So, gratefully, this was a lesson with no dire consequences that opens up the door for a clear conversation with your daughter that you didn’t otherwise think to have.
It’s also OK to not be quick to let your daughter attend sleepovers until you know the people who live in that friend’s house well—and by that, I mean everyone who lives in the house. Plan play dates in which you stay over and see how people come and go, including other family members. Understand the family’s norms.
This is all OK to do, and it’s also OK if you don’t want your daughter to stay somewhere. Your gut feeling is your guide. Offer your house up as the sleepover location instead. Having something you can provide that the other houses don’t have makes this easier. “Oh, I was going to rent a projector screen and have a movie night in the backyard if so-and-so wants to spend the night at our house instead.”
As your daughter gets older, though, you might want to loosen the reins a bit. But by that time, you can be confident that she’ll be ready and able to identify when a situation is off. She’ll also know that you are one phone call away if she ever needs you. You can even have a code word that she can text you when she feels uncomfortable and wants you to make up an excuse for her to come home.
But don’t feel like you’re a failure. If anything, it was a catalyst for learning. As parents, we’re all doing the best we can.
—Arionne
More Advice From Slate
My daughter is 13 years old. For most of her life, she’s been fairly self-motivated and independent. She doesn’t seem to have cared a whole lot about what other people thought of her. She’s pursued her interests as she’d had them: gymnastics, music, art, whatever. When she was little, we were worried about the difficulties of social pressure, but she seemed to have avoided them—until now.
