She had no choice in the matter! She comforted a crying child who was begging to go home, and she listened to what the child wanted.

Sleepovers are not fun for everyone. If you grew up sleeping over at your friend’s house, you probably have some memory of one of the sleepover attendees crying for their mom to pick them up before the night was up. Maybe you were that kid, and that’s okay! It can be really difficult to be away from the familiarity of your home, especially if that is all you’ve ever known.

If you’re hosting sleepovers as a parent, you need to be prepared to make a decision if one of the attendees comes to you crying that they want to go home. If you don’t know the child or their parents very well, it can be a difficult decision. Your instinct might be to call their parents right away to come get them, but if it’s 3 in the morning, it’s easy to hesitate and try to comfort the kid so they can at least get it together until morning. But if a kid is insisting they need to go home to their mother, there is little justification for refusing to call their mother to pick them up. The sleepover host mom in this story did all the right things when her guest came to her crying in the middle of the night, but the guest’s mom was annoyed that she was woken up to pick up her daughter.