Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio has been writing about family life since she was pregnant with the first of her three children, in 1988.

Somewhere between “Ring Around the Rosy” and “Spin the Bottle,” I missed something in the parenting guide on kid party activities.

Co-ed sleepovers. I repeat: Teenage girls and teenage boys having a slumber party. Together. At the home of willing parents.

Whaaaat?

Apparently this is a trend, a norm like texting 7,000 messages a month or wearing flip flops to graduation, that Time.com says has been “sweeping the teen circuit” for several years, with parents following along. Some such parties, according to various Google sites on the topic, are tame, boys and girls relegated to different floors of the host house while parents stay up all night supervising. Some aren’t so tame. Despite parents’ attempts at rules and boundaries, boys and girls manage to sneak off together and do exactly what we hope they won’t. Other parties fall somewhere in between, girls and boys in separate sleeping bags on the same den floor, under strict orders from the host parents: “No touching below the shoulders.”

Meanwhile, I was the last to know, until 7 o’clock on a Saturday night in May as my 16-year-old daughter, in a buttercup yellow dress and just the tiniest bit of mascara, headed off to junior-senior prom with a boy and two other couples. We parents were standing around a back deck after the photo op ritual, when one of the moms confirmed the kids’ after-party was at her house. The boy-girl after-party. The boy-girl SLEEPOVER after-party.

To say I was stunned that night is like saying my daughter looked kind of pretty in her prom dress. Still, I let it go. I let her go, partly because I trusted the parents who were hosting the sleepover, mostly because I trust my daughter and the judgment of her friends, who’ve been on church- and school-sponsored camping trips together, whose idea of a fun Friday night is sitting around our kitchen table with pizza and Monopoly.

But you can be sure the next day and the next, I talked — and listened — to my daughter. I talked to my husband and my parent friends, including a couple who are psychologists. And I learned and re-learned a few things, mostly that understanding and managing the next generation of teenaged behavior is not as cut-and-dried as making a PB&J, no crust please, Mommy.

It’s true that the job of a parent, no matter the age of the child, should be to protect, monitor and lead toward good choices. None of those good choices include teen sex. We don’t set out condoms on silver platters at parties any more than we give out drugs or alcohol. I don’t care how “good” my kids are, I don’t hand them the keys to the house when I go out of town and say, “Go for it.”

It’s also true that the job of a parent is to respect the reality of the constantly evolving culture in which their children live.

Strange as it may seem to my sensibilities — which are built on memories of what I was doing when I was a teenager in the 1970s — today’s girls and boys mix in casual, platonic relationships much more easily than we did a generation ago. According to pscyhologists, the modern-day co-ed sleepover may be a natural response to this evolution of cross-gender relationships. Co-ed sleepovers at the right house, under the right circumstances, offer a chance for boys and girls to negotiate friendship and intimacy without the threat of sex, before they go away to college and have to negotiate all this on their own without any safe boundaries from us.

In the end, after much discussion and rumination, my husband and I, who usually fall on one side or the other, surprised ourselves.

We told our daughter we trusted her. Period. Trust is the pin on which future behavior and understanding hinges. It’s important that she hears that and most importantly, that she believes us.

But some things, we told her, we simply will not do. That includes supporting future, spontaneous co-ed sleepovers at the homes of kids we barely know — like the one she was invited to a few nights after the prom sleepover. Boys were going to be in one tent in the back yard, girls in another, while Mom slept in a bedroom upstairs. I don’t think so.

Will we hear what our daughter has to say about another sleepover on another special occasion night? Sure, OK, we told her. Will we agree to let her go? On four conditions: We know the parents. There is constant supervision. Once it’s time to “crash,” the boys and girls are segregated in defined spaces, preferably on different floors. And she agrees to participate in conversation with us before she goes, at which time we will listen, too.

On the topic of future sleepovers, my husband and I came down somewhere in the middle — which is not always apparent at first glance, which, as it turns out, is not a bad place to be when you’re the parent of a teenager.

The middle gives us room to move.

- McClatchy-Tribune

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