The divorce (and the run-up to it) was far more devastating than the mere fact of coming home to an empty house, starting in middle school c. 2002. I notice that there's no accounting for forced after-school program attendance (my reality up until about 3rd grade). Nor the time my dad was deployed and my mom doing deployed wife things. What did the damage wasn't the physical lack of presence, but the emotional abandonment. Recognition of my needs - a few HGH jabs so that I wouldn't be the shortest kid in my class anymore, a car so that I could socialize like a normal person with my classmates at the school I was bussed to - would have gone a lot farther than them being all up in my business constantly (which they mercifully were not, if only because they didn't know how to check my browser's history).
Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally? I see this article talk about “but there is a dark side” of being a latchkey kid but that doesn’t seem that surprising to me tbh, absent parental figures never seem to be a good thing.
It depends. In elementary school my younger brother and I took a public transit bus to school. It was out of necessity or my mother wouldn't have been able to work two jobs without us being latch key kids. We knew how to iron our clothes, cook breakfast on a stove and use a fry daddy for chicken nuggets and fries. Often times we were only latchkey kids in the morning and after school would walk to our aunts or grandmoms and wait for mom after work.
We were largely unsupervised in Baltimore. Was it a good thing that we were autonomous and had the freedom to make mistakes without a guarding there to ensure they were responsible for our mistake..? Maybe. But I don't think any bad came from being a latchkey kid. IMO, SHTF in a kid's teenage years. I think it's way more important to be supervised in the pre-teen/teen years than a youner years. Simply because teenagers get into way more mischief that young kids.
It was seen as a thing that was. Some of my peers (in first grade!) got home to a parent, some had a key and got home to an empty house. The question wasn't was someone home when they got off school, but did the parents get home and create a great family life for the rest of the night.
>> Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally?
Yes.
When I was 9 or 10 my neighbors and I would grab the $5 our parents left behind for us. We'd walk down to the local hockey/skating rink. Usually pretty early around 8-9am before the warming house opened. We'd skate until noon when the warming house guy closed it and went home for lunch. Three or four of us would then walk to the local BK, eat lunch and hang out until 1pm. We'd then go back and skate until dusk. We'd go home around 6-7 and when we got home our parents would be home, and dinner would be ready where we'd go through each family member and talk about their day.
All through primary school this was the norm. My dad worked at a high tech company was gone usually from 7am sometimes until 7 or 8pm. My mom was taking college courses during the day and sometimes at night to become an attorney. My sister and brother were fine being on our own. The one constant was my mom or dad would get home, change their clothes and start dinner. If both parents were home, I'd go play catch with Dad while Mom made dinner.
We never felt neglected since many of the neighbors were in the same situation so we more often than not would hang out at their house, or get together in the street and play many kinds of sports or if the girls were there, we would play games like red light green light, tag, hide and go seek, kick the can, etc until we all got called home for dinner.
It was more or less just being independent for a while until your parents got home and you had dinner and then you'd do your homework before going to practice or your games. My mom and dad made it a point to be at every game they could. They made sure we were carpooling other kids who's parents were gone or couldn't drive them for whatever reason.
I think there is a huge difference saying parents in this era were neglectful. They weren't, they just had kids who were brought up well enough to stay out of trouble, take of ourselves and our neighbors until our parents would be available again. There were plenty of times where parents of one household would essentially be watching over three or four different families kids while they were out. So it was never neglectful, I like to think it just a community watching out for each other and working together to allow families the time and energy to do what they needed to do to keep their kids feed, clothed and a roof over their head. Nowadays you just hear too many excuses. Back then? There were none, you just did what you had to in order to get by and everybody in my neighborhood chipped in any way they could.
>Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally?
I think it's mostly seen as an unfortunately economic necessity, but some of those kids grew up and now look back upon that time favorably because the parental neglect let them develop a sense of independence.
> because the parental neglect let them develop a sense of independence.
Parental neglect is an incredibly strong (and I'd argue biased) word to use here if we're using the articles definition of a latch key kid.
The article says "3.5 million latchkey kids in the U.S., or seven per cent of those between the ages of 5 and 13".
There's a massive difference between a 5 year old being home alone for a few hours each day and a teenager being home alone for a few hours. Even more so if, like it says in the article, there's support systems in place (like a neighbor that can be contacted in case of an emergency) and an established pattern (the kid isn't just unexpectedly home alone).
An 8 year old unexpectedly left home alone for an unknown amount of time without any support system could absolutely be called neglect (although it makes a great Christmas movie), but a 16 year old in an empty house from 2:30-5 every day with a full fridge and friendly neighbors next door is completely reasonable and (IMO) a healthy way to let them develop independence.
It's a term used by this very article, opening the second paragraph.
> This is a by-now standard Gen X coping mechanism: treating childhood neglect – in this case, taking care of ourselves after school – as a matter of significant pride, part of our generational identity.
A few hours of alone time per day is not neglect, that's a ridiculous view. If you meant general neglect even when the parents were home than sure I can see it, but even TFA points out when adjusted for other factors a few hours of alone time has no negative effect.
It's typical survivor bias bullshit. Those who went through it and happened to turn out relatively OK have no problem wearing it as a badge of pride. Same thing with people whose parents dished out corporal punishment.
The way I remember it, it was used pejoratively, and that kids who were, were somehow deprived, and wouldn't grow up "correctly", until the generation of kids that described grew up, and it turns out they grew up just fine so it stopped being a pejorative.
It was a pejorative against kids not growing up in a traditional family, with a breadwinner father, and a stay-at-home homemaker mother, as that was the only family arrangement that was allowed at that time, and any deviation was seen as deviant.
Umm, where is the control group of latchkey kids who did not grow up in dysfunctional families?
My parents were self-employed, but during the fall, often busy at the other place (a fishing camp -- this one: http://matt.wandel.ca/amogla/amogla.html ) at the time we came home from school. Dinner was ready, warmed up in the oven (no microwaves then, at least in our household, but that's why ovens had/have timers!) and we ate and played and did all the usual stuff (homework, sigh) without parental supervision.
That's not neglect and we grew up fine, and yes, with additional sense of responsibility. For example, one day, the newly acquired stick-shift 1985 Toyota Van sat there, the parents having gone to the camp in the truck. We all piled in there, and I, the only one at the time old enough to have a driver's licence but no stick-shift experience worth mentioning, kind of figured it out as I went, and drove everyone to the camp. We survived, the van did too, parents were fine with it. We were trusted to do this kind of thing on our own judgement, rather than parental micromanagement. That's the difference.
The article mentions that when you control for such things latchkey do about as well as their peers overall. There are a few things they are worse on (girls are more likely to shoplift for example), but overall there isn't much difference in outcomes when you control for other factors. Parents leave their kids home alone for a short time after school before they get off work and home - and then have a great family life the rest of the night result in kids that do as well later in life as parents that are there after school. Parents that neglect their kids can come home before the kids and still neglect their kids.
Then the article veers into a rant about divorce that from what I can tell isn't as supported by studies.
Most dysfunctional families don't realize how dis-functional they are, it's just the norm for them, possibly over several generations. I grew up in a multi-generational house with grandparents and gruncles. There's always someone at home. Yet, one year in primary school it took my mom months until she figure that I had to go to detention every Friday because I didn't do my homework during the week. Took me 42 years to figure that was because of my ADHD...
A good balance is needed when raising children, give them the safety to confide in you, the trust that they can rely on your support and the encouragement to take on the world. Half the time parents and their child spend together over the child's lifetime is in the first 12 years. That's not a lot of time to raise a child and having my daughter for nine years now I can only recommend to spend much more time with them when they are little.
latchkey kid is a child who is left home alone or unsupervised for a significant portion of the day, typically after school, because their parents are away at work.
Yeah I was a latchkey kid, my parents have been married 30 years now, made > 350k/yr as a family in the early aughts. Always knew I had food, knew my parents would be home at 6 and I had my dogs for company. Parents always heaped love, and were proud of my direction in life. 2.5 hours of alone time was great for developing my sense of personal independence and responsibility. Then in high school with both football and wrestling it became a non issue (if it ever was, certainly wasn't for me)
I grew up better than fine relative to many of my peers, and any issues I have left over were definitely more from other children.
Much like the article suspects, I believe it comes down to other issues like divorce and general neglect even after the parents are home not a few hours of alone time every day.
>> And this was accompanied by skyrocketing divorce rates: married couples with children made up 40 per cent of households in 1970, but only a quarter in 1990.
The proportion of households with children would be interesting to know: the married couples with children could have diminished in proportion because boomers had aged out of living with their parents and had set up their own households without children (yet).
I remember a story about a group of latchkey, upper-class neighborhood kids in the 12-13 yo range that became sexually active, mimicking the Playboy channel activities and getting STDs in the process. Colorado in the 1990s I think? Googling for that is a landmine as you could imagine.
The truth about latchkey kids is that they're not a monolith; Shocking, I know, especially in such a small world of 8 billion people.
Being a latchkey kid encompasses a ridiculously large group of people.
Me being a middle class kid of a divorced mother who finishes work an hour or so after I finish school in the UK fits.
Plenty of other people with family in worse economic positions fit the definition too. Not turning up till late evening, later shifts.
Makes no sense to lump them all together.
The divorce (and the run-up to it) was far more devastating than the mere fact of coming home to an empty house, starting in middle school c. 2002. I notice that there's no accounting for forced after-school program attendance (my reality up until about 3rd grade). Nor the time my dad was deployed and my mom doing deployed wife things. What did the damage wasn't the physical lack of presence, but the emotional abandonment. Recognition of my needs - a few HGH jabs so that I wouldn't be the shortest kid in my class anymore, a car so that I could socialize like a normal person with my classmates at the school I was bussed to - would have gone a lot farther than them being all up in my business constantly (which they mercifully were not, if only because they didn't know how to check my browser's history).
Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally? I see this article talk about “but there is a dark side” of being a latchkey kid but that doesn’t seem that surprising to me tbh, absent parental figures never seem to be a good thing.
It depends. In elementary school my younger brother and I took a public transit bus to school. It was out of necessity or my mother wouldn't have been able to work two jobs without us being latch key kids. We knew how to iron our clothes, cook breakfast on a stove and use a fry daddy for chicken nuggets and fries. Often times we were only latchkey kids in the morning and after school would walk to our aunts or grandmoms and wait for mom after work.
We were largely unsupervised in Baltimore. Was it a good thing that we were autonomous and had the freedom to make mistakes without a guarding there to ensure they were responsible for our mistake..? Maybe. But I don't think any bad came from being a latchkey kid. IMO, SHTF in a kid's teenage years. I think it's way more important to be supervised in the pre-teen/teen years than a youner years. Simply because teenagers get into way more mischief that young kids.
It was seen as a thing that was. Some of my peers (in first grade!) got home to a parent, some had a key and got home to an empty house. The question wasn't was someone home when they got off school, but did the parents get home and create a great family life for the rest of the night.
>> Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally?
Yes.
When I was 9 or 10 my neighbors and I would grab the $5 our parents left behind for us. We'd walk down to the local hockey/skating rink. Usually pretty early around 8-9am before the warming house opened. We'd skate until noon when the warming house guy closed it and went home for lunch. Three or four of us would then walk to the local BK, eat lunch and hang out until 1pm. We'd then go back and skate until dusk. We'd go home around 6-7 and when we got home our parents would be home, and dinner would be ready where we'd go through each family member and talk about their day.
All through primary school this was the norm. My dad worked at a high tech company was gone usually from 7am sometimes until 7 or 8pm. My mom was taking college courses during the day and sometimes at night to become an attorney. My sister and brother were fine being on our own. The one constant was my mom or dad would get home, change their clothes and start dinner. If both parents were home, I'd go play catch with Dad while Mom made dinner.
We never felt neglected since many of the neighbors were in the same situation so we more often than not would hang out at their house, or get together in the street and play many kinds of sports or if the girls were there, we would play games like red light green light, tag, hide and go seek, kick the can, etc until we all got called home for dinner.
It was more or less just being independent for a while until your parents got home and you had dinner and then you'd do your homework before going to practice or your games. My mom and dad made it a point to be at every game they could. They made sure we were carpooling other kids who's parents were gone or couldn't drive them for whatever reason.
I think there is a huge difference saying parents in this era were neglectful. They weren't, they just had kids who were brought up well enough to stay out of trouble, take of ourselves and our neighbors until our parents would be available again. There were plenty of times where parents of one household would essentially be watching over three or four different families kids while they were out. So it was never neglectful, I like to think it just a community watching out for each other and working together to allow families the time and energy to do what they needed to do to keep their kids feed, clothed and a roof over their head. Nowadays you just hear too many excuses. Back then? There were none, you just did what you had to in order to get by and everybody in my neighborhood chipped in any way they could.
> Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally?
Only by the people who fondly describe their childhood that way. The term itself is very indicative of how the person feels about it.
>Was being a latchkey kid seen as a good thing generally?
I think it's mostly seen as an unfortunately economic necessity, but some of those kids grew up and now look back upon that time favorably because the parental neglect let them develop a sense of independence.
> because the parental neglect let them develop a sense of independence.
Parental neglect is an incredibly strong (and I'd argue biased) word to use here if we're using the articles definition of a latch key kid.
The article says "3.5 million latchkey kids in the U.S., or seven per cent of those between the ages of 5 and 13".
There's a massive difference between a 5 year old being home alone for a few hours each day and a teenager being home alone for a few hours. Even more so if, like it says in the article, there's support systems in place (like a neighbor that can be contacted in case of an emergency) and an established pattern (the kid isn't just unexpectedly home alone).
An 8 year old unexpectedly left home alone for an unknown amount of time without any support system could absolutely be called neglect (although it makes a great Christmas movie), but a 16 year old in an empty house from 2:30-5 every day with a full fridge and friendly neighbors next door is completely reasonable and (IMO) a healthy way to let them develop independence.
It's a term used by this very article, opening the second paragraph.
> This is a by-now standard Gen X coping mechanism: treating childhood neglect – in this case, taking care of ourselves after school – as a matter of significant pride, part of our generational identity.
That's fair. I missed that when I read it.
I still stand by my point, but now it should be more directed at the author of the article and not the comment I replied to
A few hours of alone time per day is not neglect, that's a ridiculous view. If you meant general neglect even when the parents were home than sure I can see it, but even TFA points out when adjusted for other factors a few hours of alone time has no negative effect.
It's typical survivor bias bullshit. Those who went through it and happened to turn out relatively OK have no problem wearing it as a badge of pride. Same thing with people whose parents dished out corporal punishment.
The way I remember it, it was used pejoratively, and that kids who were, were somehow deprived, and wouldn't grow up "correctly", until the generation of kids that described grew up, and it turns out they grew up just fine so it stopped being a pejorative.
It was a pejorative against kids not growing up in a traditional family, with a breadwinner father, and a stay-at-home homemaker mother, as that was the only family arrangement that was allowed at that time, and any deviation was seen as deviant.
If the parents are otherwise supportive it does not seem like that bad of a thing
Umm, where is the control group of latchkey kids who did not grow up in dysfunctional families?
My parents were self-employed, but during the fall, often busy at the other place (a fishing camp -- this one: http://matt.wandel.ca/amogla/amogla.html ) at the time we came home from school. Dinner was ready, warmed up in the oven (no microwaves then, at least in our household, but that's why ovens had/have timers!) and we ate and played and did all the usual stuff (homework, sigh) without parental supervision.
That's not neglect and we grew up fine, and yes, with additional sense of responsibility. For example, one day, the newly acquired stick-shift 1985 Toyota Van sat there, the parents having gone to the camp in the truck. We all piled in there, and I, the only one at the time old enough to have a driver's licence but no stick-shift experience worth mentioning, kind of figured it out as I went, and drove everyone to the camp. We survived, the van did too, parents were fine with it. We were trusted to do this kind of thing on our own judgement, rather than parental micromanagement. That's the difference.
The article mentions that when you control for such things latchkey do about as well as their peers overall. There are a few things they are worse on (girls are more likely to shoplift for example), but overall there isn't much difference in outcomes when you control for other factors. Parents leave their kids home alone for a short time after school before they get off work and home - and then have a great family life the rest of the night result in kids that do as well later in life as parents that are there after school. Parents that neglect their kids can come home before the kids and still neglect their kids.
Then the article veers into a rant about divorce that from what I can tell isn't as supported by studies.
Most dysfunctional families don't realize how dis-functional they are, it's just the norm for them, possibly over several generations. I grew up in a multi-generational house with grandparents and gruncles. There's always someone at home. Yet, one year in primary school it took my mom months until she figure that I had to go to detention every Friday because I didn't do my homework during the week. Took me 42 years to figure that was because of my ADHD...
A good balance is needed when raising children, give them the safety to confide in you, the trust that they can rely on your support and the encouragement to take on the world. Half the time parents and their child spend together over the child's lifetime is in the first 12 years. That's not a lot of time to raise a child and having my daughter for nine years now I can only recommend to spend much more time with them when they are little.
PS: I love you brother's YT channel
TIL "latchkey kid"
Yeah I was a latchkey kid, my parents have been married 30 years now, made > 350k/yr as a family in the early aughts. Always knew I had food, knew my parents would be home at 6 and I had my dogs for company. Parents always heaped love, and were proud of my direction in life. 2.5 hours of alone time was great for developing my sense of personal independence and responsibility. Then in high school with both football and wrestling it became a non issue (if it ever was, certainly wasn't for me)
I grew up better than fine relative to many of my peers, and any issues I have left over were definitely more from other children.
Much like the article suspects, I believe it comes down to other issues like divorce and general neglect even after the parents are home not a few hours of alone time every day.
>> And this was accompanied by skyrocketing divorce rates: married couples with children made up 40 per cent of households in 1970, but only a quarter in 1990.
The proportion of households with children would be interesting to know: the married couples with children could have diminished in proportion because boomers had aged out of living with their parents and had set up their own households without children (yet).
I remember a story about a group of latchkey, upper-class neighborhood kids in the 12-13 yo range that became sexually active, mimicking the Playboy channel activities and getting STDs in the process. Colorado in the 1990s I think? Googling for that is a landmine as you could imagine.