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JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, LAUREN Rosner, 17, and 11 friends spilled through the door of her parents' Flossmoor, Ill., home, flushed with the euphoria of this month's Homewood-Flossmoor Community High Homecoming. They changed into cozy sweats and jeans, descended on the kitchen like a platoon of army ants and eventually collapsed into sleeping bags in the rec room. Upstairs, Neal and Sheri Rosner slept the fairly peaceful sleep of parents who are almost entirely sure that nothing untoward is going on under their roof. Because here, and in towns all over America, the timeless ritual of the suburban slumber party has changed. It's gone coed.
Some experts see this as a natural outgrowth of the trend toward semi-platonic ""group dating,'' an activity formerly known as ""hanging out.'' Others attribute it to parents' natural preference to keep their children off the roads in the dangerous post-midnight hours after fall homecoming and spring prom parties. As for Sheri Rosner, she's morally certain that none of her daughter's guests misbehaved, although of course she wasn't in the room to see. But, she says, ""I still would rather have them here than worry about my daughter being somewhere else.''
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For their part, the kids are even more morally certain that coed sleepovers don't lead to sex. In fact, the very idea shocks them. ""There was no making out or anything,'' Lauren says emphatically. ""Kids don't want to do that in front of somebody else.'' A sleepover ""is not an orgy, nothing of the sort,'' insists Stacey Lucas, 16, of Lincolnwood, Ill. ""If someone started kissing in front of me, I'd ask them to leave.''
Savvy parents are happy to take advantage of the theory of safety in numbers by covering every inch of floor with teenagers. For her daughter Meredith's junior prom, Barbara Ostrom packed 50 of her classmates into the family's vacation house in Ocean Grove, N.J. ""Nowhere was there a kid alone in a space,'' she says. ""There wasn't any place a couple could be alone in a room. There was no sex in our house, I'll tell you that.'' This statement, definitive as it is, does not specifically cover the adjoining beach, to which guests occasionally repaired for walks. ""I didn't see that many couple things going on,'' Meredith says, ""though a few of those happened.''
Meredith is quick to say, however, that nothing went on that was much different from any other party. The fact that the guests slept over did not inhibit ""couple things,'' but neither did it seem to promote them. Which, to many parents, sounds like a reasonable bargain, considering that no one ever wrecked her car while sleeping in her own basement.
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