Kittens & Sleepovers

As I leaned over the rail of the crib to sing Oakley, our 1-year-old, to sleep, I could hear the distinct tinkling of Legos being played with. My eyes jetted across the room expecting to find that our 3-year-old son had abandoned his toddler bed for a midnight Lego session. But alas, he lay there, sleepily enjoying my song. At first, I was confounded by the reality that ANYONE could enjoy the sound of me singing, but as the clatter of Legos ensued, I knew I had bigger fish to fry. If Little Domenick was in his bed, who was under the train table playing with the Legos??…………KITTEN. (Crazy eye.) More endearingly known as Midnight. But don’t let the photo fool you, this kitty is as much crazy as she is cute.

My mind fast-forwarded and rewound all at once. If Midnight finds a cozy spot amongst the Legos, and she is left to covertly camp out in my kids’ room…. (Don’t worry this isn’t a post about sleepovers with cats)….. She might pull another kitty karate move on Oakley at 2am, to awaken us to horrified screams, because she has, yet again, decided to pounce on my baby in the middle of the night. (Yes, this has actually happened.) The cat is smarter than I thought. Afterall, Oakley probably IS the best candidate for a playdate at 2am.

I decided that for the sake of my child (and my sleep!), I would help kitty find her bed. But that was a more elusive task than I had expected. As I swiped my hands through the air grasping for her little body under the train table, I was met with her dagger-like claws and ferocious teeth. (I feel like I’m quoting The Gruffalo here.) I finally managed to grab her by the scruff and escorted her to her cozy abode.

She currently spends her sleeping hours in a cage on the porch adorned with a litter box, water, food and a snuggly blanket. She spent her first few days of life in a wooded area, but since she was so little when we first got her, we had to keep her inside 100% of the time waiting for her to grow up a bit. Truth is, it would’ve been irresponsible and heartless for us to start her outside. She could’ve easily been pawed to death by our black lab, ganged up on by our five barn cats, or eaten as a quick snack by a passing fox.

But on the flipside of that, despite weighing in at a mere couple pounds soaking wet, this little kitty has somehow managed to run off our veteran barn cats over the past 2 weeks of her slowly being introduced to the great outdoors. We laugh at the fact that when we lock her up in her cage at night, we are protecting her from the threats of the outdoors just as much as we are protecting the dog, the barn cats, and maybe even the foxes FROM HER. She’s crazy, y’all. Little but fierce.

(And for those of you who are still wondering if this whole post was about kitten sleepovers, it’s not. I use this picture of Midnight’s cage to illustrate something much deeper….)

You see, most parents don’t let their kids sleepover at a friend’s house because of what might happen TO THEM. But we should equally be protecting our children and their friends from what they could foolishly do TO OTHERS.

Kids are curious, just like kittens are playful. Can we really blame the kitten for trying to wrestle Oakley at 2am? Not really. She doesn’t know better, and kittens are known to play, play, play! In the same sense, we can’t really blame kids for being curious. Afterall, their curiosity serves them well so long as it is within the rails of what is appropriate to discover – like what a salamander feels like or what happens when you jump in a puddle. But we are here to reign that in if they want to catch a wasp in their hand or see what happens when they pour sand on their baby sister’s head. Their frontal lobe isn’t fully developed, and their reasoning is virtually non-existent. These are the moments we, as their parents, are called to intercede and protect them.

Putting a couple of children in a room at night without supervision sounds like good fun for a child. But as a parent, with 38 years of life under my belt, and a fully developed frontal lobe, I know what this is likely to lead to. The responsibility falls on us, Parents. It is our job to protect them from others AND protect them from themselves.

Years ago, when my husband and I first took the stand against sleepovers, we didn’t know anyone else who took that same stance, which immediately left some parents taken back and even slightly offended. With sleepovers being the cultural norm, I imagine some of the thoughts rolling around in their minds would be something like, “Don’t they trust me? What do they think my kid is going to corrupt their perfect little children??” So, we would happily offer up the reality that this decision was equally to protect THEIR child as much as it was to protect ours. We wanted them to know that we weren’t ignorant of our own children’s ability to mess up. Afterall, “as it is written, no one is righteous, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10) Trust me, we are continually reminded of our children’s ability to sin. It is our job, as their parents, to continually chasten them until they are ready to make sound decisions. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. (Proverbs 22:15) There is hope! Through discipline, we can trust that they will eventually develop the ability to make sound decisions. Thanks be to God!

Common sense seems to be on the rise because according to statistics, sleepovers are taking a hit in recent years. (Wahoo!!) Parents are speaking up about the realities of sexual abuse, bullying, exposure to drugs, or introduction to demonic activities through Ouija boards and ‘fun and innocent’ demonic chants like, ‘Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” I still get chills thinking about how that ACTUALLY worked several times as a kid. The spirit world is real. But I digress… Another major concern is the reality that so many kids have devices these days. All that unsupervised time on phones and tablets could EASILY lead to inappropriate online connections and being exposed to pornography and other content that our children simply aren’t ready for. You might chuckle and think, “WOW. THE SKY IS FALLING, AMY!!! This is a little intense. MOST kids are just having a pizza party, eating ice cream sundaes and watching movies until they can’t keep their eyes open. Live a little!!’ But unfortunately for me, ALL of the examples above are real life examples of people I personally know.

These things happen. And they happen often.

As I have been preparing to write on this topic, I’ve been openly discussing the concept with others, and across the board, it seems like shortly into the conversation, people just start pouring out the things that happened to them as a child at sleepovers. And that doesn’t include the things that THEY did or the situations that are simply too hard and embarrassing to say out loud. I venture to guess that if we were to poll people, we would be flabbergasted to know that virtually everyone has had something inappropriate happen in some shape or form at a sleepover. Actually, let’s do it! Would you click this link and ANONYMOUSLY answer two quick questions about your personal experience with sleepovers? You will be able to see the poll results after you submit.

But maybe this is why we are seeing a decline in sleepovers…Too many people are using their common sense and saying, ‘I don’t want the same things to happen to my kid that happened to me. Or I don’t want my kids to make the same mistakes I did. I don’t want them to live with the aftermath of those injustices throughout the duration of their lives and have to fight and claw their way back to purity and innocence.” Remember, they’re kittens. While the liberal articles tout sleepovers as a ‘rite of passage’ and an opportunity to establish a child’s independence, I scream ‘PROTECT THEM!!! Please.’

I remember hearing an analogy years ago about likening a child to a little seedling. If you’ve ever grown tomatoes or peppers in Northeast Tennessee, you know that you need to get a head start on the growing season in order to get much fruit before winter hits. We did this by simply starting seeds mid-January in our bathroom, on a heat mat with grow lights. In those first days, it was imperative to keep them moist and warm to support germination. Once the seedling emerges, you must be mindful of its growth, keeping it watered regularly, adjusting the light when needed to ensure they didn’t get fried or too leggy. And once that seedling was big enough, you start to ‘harden it off’. This simply means that you bring it outside to a slightly shaded area giving the seedling the chance exposed to indirect sunlight, gentle breezes, and the natural elements in small increments — increasing the length of time as the plants get used to their new environment, until finally you are ready to get them in the ground – preferably in the late afternoon on an overcast day when you’re not expecting a torrential downpour.

I learned the hard way one year how important hardening off is. I chose to put my seedlings out in direct sunlight. In my defense, it was a cloudy day! Anyhow, I forgot about them for the entire day and came back to our whole lot of tomatoes and peppers completely fried. The intense summer sun was too much for these little guys and I lost all but a few. And those very few that did survive had to be nursed back to health and were severely delayed in their growth.

Another time I didn’t want to take the time to harden them off, so I just planted them and figured they would make do. Well, they didn’t.

Don’t let that be your babies. Protect them while they are young. Harden them off, so they are ready to face the world with some roots in the ground. Don’t haphazardly put them out there too soon to be stunted and delayed in their growth. Being scorched by the world makes them less trusting of others, and less trusting of the God who loves them. As their earthly parents, we are a reflection of our heavenly Father. We are called to protect them, and they will be confused and spiritually stunted if we don’t do our best to fulfill that role.

Let’s really THINK about ‘the way they should go’ and ‘train them up’ in such a way that will produce an adult that is healthy and strong without layers of trauma or guilt to unravel. A flourishing adult that “…is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:8)

I’m always intrigued when I hear people gripe and groan about the status of the upcoming generation. Like when the Baby Boomers go on tangents about how Millennials are self-absorbed, lazy, and expect much for little. I gently turn to them and ask them who raised them. I’m sorry, but this is the hard reality that we must face, and this will soon be US looking back over the generation WE raised. It’s one thing if a child was raised diligently to be hard-working and selfless yet chose to make a U-turn and go their own way. A true apostate. But if we are lazy in our parenting, and then scoff at the outcome, we have nowhere to look but in the mirror.

It seems like every generation is challenged with a concept that is completely NEW to them. Something they didn’t walk through when they were kids, so they have no personal experience to work off of. It is so important to look at these major practicalities of life through a biblical lens and think long and hard which way this new trend will take our families – towards truth and life or towards deception and death.

Here’s a few examples that I’ve seen in my own family’s lineage. My parents’ generation was challenged with AOL instant messaging. Their parents’ generation with sleepovers. Their grandparent’s generation with the shift out of agricultural living in pursuit of sports, leisure and entertainment. And now a big one our generation as parents are facing is devices. If we zoom out and see all of these from a larger lens, we can see a pretty obvious divide – one choice presents ease and rolling along with culture, and the other presents digging your heels into the sand, taking the harder path, and likely getting persecuted in the meantime for being strict and dull.

For example, we take a pretty hard stance on devices. Because ‘everyone else is doing it’, we often have conversations with our children about WHY:

They are isolating and individualist. They do not promote the FAMILY.
They destroy social skills.
They are addicting.
They are fruitless – producing nothing good.
When used outside of productive work, they are sheer entertainment and leisure. And children rarely have productive work to accomplish on a device. It’s mostly mindless scrolling.
They waste people’s time.
They rob quality time from friends and families.
They make people irritable and cranky.
I could probably come up with about 40 bullets for this one…Can you tell I don’t love devices? 😀

We just went to a party yesterday where a teen sat on a phone THE ENTIRE time. Ahhh, the life she is missing! While kids swirled around her, giggling and jumping in and out of the pool, she sat unmoved the entire time to scroll on a lifeless screen. What a deception! A lot of people KNOW this is downright WRONG, but yet many of us still kowtow to culture and ease – allowing this slippery slope to degrade and erode our families. After all, that’s what Johnny and Sally WANT to do.

Our kids will often comment on situations like the girl at the party. On the ride home or at the breakfast table the next day, they will bring it up and say how strange and sad it is…mostly just quoting yours truly. But then Dom & I will call them out and say, “ALL of you would GLADLY scroll on a phone for hours if we allowed it,” followed by a chorus of giggles. Given the opportunity, our kids, like most children, would love to spend copious amounts of time on a phone or tablet. But again, we don’t base our parenting decisions on what children want – because, as we know, “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” (Proverbs 22:15)

So, whether it’s sleepovers or devices or the next newfangled trend emerging (like virtual reality), we must take the time to really consider the long-term implications rather than just rolling along with the current of culture. We are called to be blameless, above reproach, peculiar, a city on a hill, a royal priesthood. Through God’s Word, prayer, and an honest look at each situation, we can pick through these practicalities of life to determine whether we are setting our children on a path towards life or death.

On a closing note, I am not saying this HAS to be hard and fast and that there is ABSOLUTELY no wiggle room here. I’m not personally 100% against a family-friendly movie for everyone to enjoy together, and likewise, I’m not 100% against hosting a family who needs a place to stay. I do have stipulations for what both of those would look like – but I won’t go into the details because the point is not what I would do. The point is to be mindful that our decisions as parents has the ability to have a profound effect of the trajectory of our children’s lives. This is a heavy calling and one that comes with great responsibility. Until next time, keep chewing, ladies 😊