There’s a joke about being a Gen X kid versus being a Gen Z kid. The Gen Z kid is preparing to leave the house and his parents say, “Take your phone. Text me when you get there. Text me the names of who you’re with. Text me before you head home.” But when the Gen X kid left the house, what did his parents say? “Bye.”
It’s an accurate observation, but it leaves out a crucial detail. For it’s the Gen Xers, the generation that mostly just said “bye,” who are demanding their own kids offer up so much information and worrying so much, every time they leave the house. As such, it’s not a totally shocking thing that Gen Z is largely missing out on one of the pleasures that Gen Xers — and millennials such as Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing about the phenomenon at National Review — experienced when they said “bye”: the sleepover.
Granted, there’s probably some institutional knowledge at work here. We Gen Xers know more precisely what we got into once we left the house, whether to stay overnight elsewhere or merely for the majority of the day. There were the times we sneaked into the country club with its pool drained for the winter to skateboard. There were the small bonfires started just because we could. There were wanton acts of senseless property destruction.
Somehow, through our efforts to establish an Olympic sport and behave as unattended Boy Scouts out to earn a
