The arguments against sleepovers are logical. In a fragmented age with weakened communities, it’s harder to know where we’re sending our kids. In an age in which broken homes are even more common than when we were growing up, there are myriad variables thrown into the mix that our own parents never had to worry about.

While I am a huge proponent of making babies, and not just in the figurative sense, remember what life was like before you started making them. The freedom, the tranquility, the relative absence of inexplicable destruction to the kitchen can all be yours again, if only for a night. All that’s required is that you bring in a gaggle of other children on some night in the future and let them inflict a multiplicative level of damage upon your kitchen while your friends enjoy getting out the pressure washer and not running the dishwasher for an evening.

It’s not just about selfishness, either. As Dougherty mentioned, there is value in kids learning how to behave and be polite in a foreign environment. There’s the meal the host family loves that your kid doesn’t but has to choke down enough of. There are the differing family dynamics and interactions to navigate. The sleepover is a reality check, at least initially.

For we Gen Xers often moved beyond that reality check and to a point when we had secondary families. You didn’t have to ask what you could eat because you knew. Your dad didn’t hesitate to insist your buddy and you go out in the backyard and split some firewood. Good fences may make good neighbors, but the real magic happens when you have those neighbors who can come through the gate and get some callouses alongside you.

Not that the modern sleepover features much manual labor, unless you count the half-hearted attempts at cleaning the kitchen after the kids get done baking cookies, but they’re still a blending of people together, a little slice of community in an age in which we’re all always on the go.

Our children are fragile. They are mortal. They deserve our fierce protection. They also deserve to be raised to become adults, capable of navigating society and, yes, risks. Maybe they’ll see a movie you wouldn’t have approved of in your home. Maybe you’re the parents who let them watch that movie.

Which isn’t to say anything goes. There’s a difference between getting to watch a highly problematic movie like, say, “The Goonies,” what with its language and ableism and cisnormative displays, and watching porn, but that’s another way in which the sleepover can be beneficial. It can force parents out of their own bubbles and into talking to other parents, finding ones with whom they feel comfortable entrusting their little demons for an evening.