If you allow sleepovers...

[hippiemamato3]

at what point would you stop allowing boy/girl sleepovers, for best friends? 

[almondbutterandjelly]

I allow sleepovers but I have never allowed boy/girl sleepovers.  

[bolt.]

We only allow boy-girl “sleepovers” in the context that our family whole family is friends with another family — and that family has kids that are boy-girl in combination with our kids. We visit and stay over at their place quite regularly.

The boys (their house) sleep in their bedroom and the girls (visitors) sleep in an open playroom. The kids go to “bed” — unsupervised — long before the adults. We’ve been using a baby monitor to keep a lid on shenanigans.

We don’t intend to quit doing this at any particular age.

[Bambam]

We done limited sleepovers but never boy/girl sleepovers. 

[DawnM]

My boys have never had girls spend the night and I would not feel comfortable doing it.  My boys have had frequent friends (same gender) spend the night.

[lulalu]

Boy/ girl sleepovers are only with cousins. My ds is 6 and cousin is 7. They just had a sleepover the other week. 

[Tanaqui]

Have you considered having them sleep in different rooms?

[hippiemamato3]

2 hours ago, Tanaqui said:

Have you considered having them sleep in different rooms?

I think at some point we definitely would, though  I think if it got there we would likely just stop sleepovers entirely? I'm not sure!

ETA: I don't see any reason to separate them at this point, but am genuinely curious if anyone else has allowed this. This is perhaps not the best place to ask, but I figured I'd try!

Edited November 14, 2018 by hippiemamato3

[rebcoola]

Not something likely to come up here now boy best friend moved 2,000 away.  But I would probably allow it forever as long as the sleeping was in a public-ish room like our rec-room.  I had girl/boy sleepovers all through High School they never turned into anything.  I never thought about inviting any of my Boyfriends over for a sleepover.

[hippiemamato3]

6 minutes ago, rebcoola said:

Not something likely to come up here now boy best friend moved 2,000 away.  But I would probably allow it forever as long as the sleeping was in a public-ish room like our rec-room.  I had girl/boy sleepovers all through High School they never turned into anything.  I never thought about inviting any of my Boyfriends over for a sleepover.

I had some boy/girl sleepovers as a kid/teen as well - it was platonic. 

[Jaybee]

6 hours ago, perkybunch said:

I allow sleepovers but I have never allowed boy/girl sleepovers.  

Same here.

[Farrar]

We have had girls sleep over a few times. We don't have rules about it per se. They haven't asked for one recently now that they're teens so it's been awhile - maybe around age 10. When I was in high school, we did mixed gender sleepovers routinely, though as a group - generally staying up most of the night and crashing with a movie. There were a lot of gay, lesbian, and bi kids in my friend group though, and I remember one mom being like, I give, just let everyone sleep over.

I wouldn't say no to it... I might require a different room. Or that they be in a public part of the house with loose supervision... this is a no brainer here though because dh  works from home overnights, so it's easy. I don't know what I'd do if we didn't have that option. I remember in high school, one guy's mom used to stay up all night with a book in an adjacent room until everyone had crashed on the floor. She had dedication.

[Halftime Hope]

We had mixed sleepovers here for various high school church activities a couple of times.  Not best friends, but kids who had known each other forever.  We usually put the boys and the girls on different floors, and all of the same gender slept in a large room together in sleeping bags.  

For young best friends, I'd let them sleep in the same very public room together, the living room for example, till they were about 8, and then transition the guest to their very own room, or to a room with a same gender sibling.  

I hate to have to bring this up, but there has been a HUGE growth in the statistics of peer-on-peer child abuse in the last x number of years.  I think the statistic was an 800% increase in ?? years.  Many times the perp is an older family member or mate from a social group where children gather.  The stats for child molestors show that most of them start by age 12-13, and they often go for 15-20 years without being caught.

I'd be protecting my children from that kind of situation, and if I had a child who was an odd duck, I protect them from being in a situation where they could be falsely accused of such.    

[LucyStoner]

I didn’t stop allowing it.  Our only non-family co-ed sleepovers are with a family who might as well be our family.  Their older daughter is 6 months younger than my older son and their younger daughter is 1 year older than my younger son.  We followed their lead on privacy.  Once the older two were 10 or so, they wanted to be in seperate sleeping spaces. 

[Dmmetler]

I’ve been using DD’s two male friends as an excuse to get out of slumber parties for years :). Really, it was that I didn’t want a slumber party, not the co-ed part. They may be able to stay up all night, but I can’t! 

[2squared]

I don’t enjoy hosting sleepovers, but we do partake. As far as boy/girl, we don’t have rules; we just go with what feels right for he situation  

i hope to host a boy/girl sleepover for my 2nd grader and his buddies from school, but my ds isn’t ready yet.

My 16yo dd’s boyfriend and two other boys crashed at our house last month. I was surprised they wanted to stay, but it really was a nonissue for all four families.

My 16yo has spent a weekend with her boyfriend and his parents at their cabin. That worked out just fine too. 

[Chris in VA]

I didn't allow any, but didn't have reason to, since none of my kids had friends of opposite sex with whom they were tight enough to want to have them over.  

The exception to the above was youth group, but that wasn't here, was supervised, had boys and girls on different floors with an adult in the room, and was just fine by me. 

[Tenaj]

We've had this come up recently.  We have a family who has teen boys similar in ages with my teen boys and they have a younger sister who is fast friends with my youngest daughter.  My 10yods is smack in the middle but tends to hang out with the younger girls most of the time.  We have been doing sleep-overs beyween the kids for several years but now it's getting awkward.  At my house, no problem because 10yods sleeps in his own bed but at their house he's been matched up with the girls instead of with the boys.  I've been making excuses to keep him home on those nights lately but am going to have to have a discussion the next time it comes up.

So, to answer your question I guess for us it's somewhere between 9 - 11?  It also depends on the relationships.  The younger daughter in the family has declared that she'll marry my son someday -lol!  It's all innocent of course but she's a very "huggy" girl and it's beginning to bother my son a bit so it's time for some space.

[TheReader]

We've done them; ours stopped naturally (we moved away from the family/families involved) but the kids were in the 11/12-ish range at the time, I think...? And maybe one a little later than that with a different family....? 

(I'm not counting cousin sleepovers, because, cousins....)

When we do have mixed genders, we usually designate one room for each gender, and they all sleep on sleeping bags, couches, etc. If we didn't have space for that, then depending on the kids, we'd either have all the kids in one big area, or we'd put some in bedrooms. 

We recently had my niece here with two of her friends (college kids); normally my niece would go on the couch, no problem, but since she had friends with her that we didn't know -- and that didn't know us/our boys -- we booted our oldest out of his room, gave my niece & her friends his room with the bed & an air mattress, so they could close the door (lock it if wanted) and have privacy. But that was for them, not out of any concern on our part.  

If we had friends close enough to sleep over, but mixed genders in the group, I think we'd be okay allowing it as long as the kids themselves were interested, and as long as all the kids involved respected any rules/boundaries put in place (separate sleeping areas, etc.) Any inappropriate shenanigans and we'd put a stop to it. 

[SKL]

I told my kids up front that they can't do boy-girl sleepovers, so there is no need to end that.

That said, they have never been asked to a mixed sleepover, and I'm not sure what I'd say if they were.  Hopefully they would spout out our arbitrary family rule and I wouldn't have to deal with it.

My suggestion would be to just make an arbitrary rule and stick with it.  If they have done mixed sleepovers before, just say "no mixed sleepovers after age ___."