Inspired by the “free-range kids” thread.
Former latchkey kid here. I was raised by a single mom, and she just couldn’t afford a babysitter most of the time - heck, for a good proportion of my childhood she didn’t have a car. She worked either waitressing or retail jobs, and went to college during the day, which meant she sometimes didn’t get home until 10 or later.
I walked or took the (public) bus home from school, and made my own dinner (frozen dinners in the toaster-oven) if she wouldn’t be home on time. I was an only child, so no sibs to care for or to care for me. In summer, I was on my own whenever my mom wasn’t at work.
This was for most of my childhood, from 2nd grade on - approx. 1978-1988. We were all over Southern CA, though mostly in Long Beach from 5th grade (1980) on. A lot of my friends, maybe 25%, were latchkey also.
I was never assaulted or accosted on public transportation. I didn’t start any fires*, and aside from being less attentive to my homework than I might have been with more supervision, there was no long-term damage done. I felt some disdain for my friends whose parents drove them everywhere - I knew how to get wherever I needed to by bus, without having to bother an adult.
So - was anyone else a latchkey? Did anything horrible happen to you because of it, that might have been avoided if you had an adult around? Do you feel it taught you any valuable skills? Does anyone have latchkey kids of their own, or know anyone who does? How do you feel about it? How do they feel about it?
If you have non-latchkey kids, and both parents work - how do you handle it? Do you have childcare? At what age do you think you will be able to stop having childcare? Age 13? 15? 18?
Thoughts?
It came close once, though. I was about 11, and I had put an egg on to boil when my friend came over and said her family was going to go see Empire Strikes Back, did I want to come? Hell yes I did, and I completely forgot about the egg. Came back to a house full of smoke and sulfur, but short of a ruined pan and a stinky house, all was well.
I never thought of it as latchkey but I guess I was. From about fourth grade onward I was responsible for getting home and making sure my two (younger) sisters were taken care of.
Chores had to be done but for the most part we were free to entertain ourselves between the end of school and either my mom or stepdad getting home from work between 5 and 6.
Nothing particularly bad ever happened that I recall. For elementary school I went to a school that didn’t have any buses and everybody walked home (it was a rare kid who had a non-working parent to pick them up for a ride home). Middle and high school had busses but I still walked or biked exclusively.
In terms of psychological imprinting I suppose it might have contributed to my indepdendence. When I graduated high school I left home and pretty much never looked back. I think I have a good relationship with my mother but it is one where we go months without talking. On the other hand my mom had a hell of a time getting my sisters to leave the nest so that may not be the trigger.
I was a latchkey kid from early on, but I was an extremely mature and responsible kid for my age- I even was babysitting other kids from age 12. I would have been perfectly okay and safe home alone, but when you bring brothers into it, it’s not good. That’s why now I always worry about leaving my kids home alone together, but not necessarily worry about them being alone.
I always kind of surprised this seems to not be normal somehow. When I was very young, my grandmother down the street would watch me and my younger brother after school. But by the time I was 10 or so (maybe younger - due to grade acceleration in school I don’t always correcly line up my actual age with certain childhood events, since it felt like I was older than I really was), we stopped going over there every day and stayed at home by ourselves (and some point thereafter she moved, anyway). Also, during the summers – home by ourselves all day every day for 3 months every year. Actually, either home or out riding my bicycle all over town (when I was a little older – 12 or 13 maybe). I’m always a little perplexed by my coworkers and other people who are afraid to leave 10 or 11 year olds by themselves for any period of time.
Like troub, I was a de facto latchkey kid for a while before being one officially, but I started both younger – de facto at ages 5 and 6, then officially from age 7. I also walked about a quarter of a mile home either by myself or with one of the many other kids who did so. This was in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio in the late 70s. I usually spent the afternoon in the woods, by myself or with friends, except once a week when I walked with my best friend to our shared piano lesson about a mile from school. We often stopped at the candy store on the way home, and more than once I forgot my piano books there and got in biiiiig trouble when I didn’t realize it for several days (because I also “forgot” to practice. D’oh!).
I vividly remember one horrible occasion, when I was 6, stopping on the way home from piano to talk to some adult neighbor of my friend’s when I really, really had to pee. They just kept talking and talking and talking! I bet you can guess what happened. I was mortified… my point being that I was allowed to walk around town with just my same-age friend when I was still young enough to wet my pants.
At age 11, I either walked or rode the public bus to middle school all the way across town, more than 2 miles, through downtown, in a mid-size college town (Pullman, Washington).
The biggest problem I had was losing crucial objects – my housekey, my piano books, my bus pass, the check to pay for the piano lessons, etc. I was terrible about that. It eventually taught me how to designate something *not *to lose, if that makes sense; and to this day, while I am just as absentminded as ever, I know how not to lose my keys. I wish I could teach my husband this skill.
My mom was a college student from the time I was 2 until I was 8. She also worked. My older sisters watched (and by watched I mean beat the shit out of) me until I was 8 or 9 and then I watched myself (hid from them until my mom got home). I got my babysitter certification at 11 or 12 and that was actually when I went into foster care and was no longer trusted to watch myself (foster parents are understandably paranoid) although I was still allowed to watch others. When I was 14 I moved in with a new family and they trusted me (although I had foster sisters who weren’t allowed home without adult supervision unless I was there - and they were my age or older).
When I was 14, I started babysitting 2 girls who lived down the street from my foster home. I was horrified at how sheltered those girls were. They were 8 and 10 ferchrissakes!! They weren’t even allowed to make peanut butter sandwiches! They weren’t allowed to play outside without me watching and this was in a very safe neighborhood! It was about that time that I realized that modern parents are way too protective of their children and that if this is what is expected of parents these days, I don’t want to have children. It’s 16 years later and I’m still pissed off at the level of coddling that so many parents feel their children need. Luckily most of the children I have to interact with are capable of wiping their own asses (except 1, who is 8 and completely useless).
We were home for an hour before my parents got home for many years. We were responsible too. It’s not like kids have to have 100% supervision every hour of their lives.
Latchkey kid from about 4th grade through leaving the house for college. It definitely taught me to be more independent and discipline to a degree, as was obvious when I went to college. I couldn’t figure out how so many kids couldn’t manage money or discipline themselves to study/do homework at all. Then again, it also made me a bit of a deviant. That rule about only an hour of TV? Well, that really only meant an hour of TV when my parents were home. And once I discovered by Dad’s porn magazines, all bets were off. Then when computers came out, I was a whiz on the Apple IIe and got into all sorts of things with the local bulletin board services (pre-Internet), which in turn led to fun with explosives when I was an unwatched teenager. My parents trusted me because I never fucked with the liquor cabinet and got good grades. But since I knew the liquor cabinet and the grades were the only things being monitored, everything else was fair game.
My parents both worked for as long as I can remember, and as soon as they thought I’d be ok on my own (age 10 or so), I was given my own set of housekeys. I was alone for about 3-4 hours per day at my grandma’s house through eighth grade, and from ninth grade on, I went directly home after school and was alone 2-3 hours.
The walk to grandma’s house was about a mile long, and the ride home on the public bus was about an hour long. I had no problems. Never lost my keys or money, never ran into creepy strangers, nothing.
It was great. I loved the solitude and independence, and I never got into any trouble that I couldn’t get myself out of or conceal.
This was the late '80s through mid '90s in Honolulu.
As I said in the referenced thread, I was a latchkey kid (also raised by a single mom) from the age of 9 onward. I got jumped by some older kids once walking home, but that’s really it. It was otherwise uneventful.
At times, I lived close enough to home to be able to walk. Other years, I was taking the bus. Even though I lived in some less-than-desirable neighborhoods during some of that time, I really never had anything serious go wrong. And I’ve turned out to be a fine, upstanding citizen today.
I was one. My schools were all relatively close to my house (they got farther away the older I got), so my parents didn’t worry too much about walking home, I guess.
I guess I was. Not so much because parents worked, but because after work they were at a bar. Didn’t bother me. I had a city park for a back yard. Played baseball every day until the sun went down.
Yep, from some time in elementary school all through high school (although I guess the term stops applying at some point when it’s not really a big deal). I was the first to discover that my house was broke into–twice. For some reason I felt safer outside when I was alone, so I would often hang out outside until mom came home, even when it was dark.
Latchkey kid here. I walked to school by myself from second grade on (granted, elementary school was five blocks from my house), and was taking myself home and caring for my little brother by the time I was in middle school. The summer between sixth and seventh grade, I was left almost completely alone during the day, and my brother joined me the next summer.
It certainly helped with independence. Some of my students now are so ridiculously sheltered that their parents don’t trust adolescents to get home in a very nice rich suburb. These children are so much… younger… than my friends and I were at that age.
In retrospect, I pretty much was a latchkey kid from about 5th grade on. My dad worked and my mom was usually at art class or something similar at least 3-4 days a week.
Yeah, I was one. My parents separated when I was 8, divorced when I was 9. My mom moved out and got a place across town (very small town) so for a while, she picked me up from school and I stayed with her until Dad got off work. I don’t really remember when that stopped but it had by the time I was 10 or so. From that point on, I was really on my own, both after school and during the summertime. I think my Dad expected (or maybe just hoped) that my older siblings would keep an eye on me, but we hardly even acknowledged each other’s presence most of the time.
I spent my days watching television, riding my bike all over town, going to parks, going to my friends’ houses, all that stuff. I felt like I had almost no restrictions. Hell, even before my parents split, I remember walking home from school in about the first grade. It was only a couple of blocks in a small town.
Brothers and 5th grade for me. Get home, check out whether there was a shopping list, let the Bros in (they’d be dropped off by the school bus and brought up by one of our neighbors who’d also picked up her children), give them their sandwiches, go do the shopping, do my homework, help Middlebro with his, empty the dishwasher (later this became a “turns” task), bring in the washing… Mom would get home about 8 from whatever social stuff she’d been doing; there were years Dad was in by 5 (before us, but often he’d go for a walk) and others he barely came home in time to cook dinner. There were some tasks us kids took turns on: setting the table, putting it away and, later, emptying the dishwasher. During the year Mom was bedridden (I was in 11th grade, the Bros in 5th and 3rd) I started handing out some of the shopping. The supermarket was just across the street, maybe 100 yards away; I didn’t ask them to buy anything complicated (fruit, veggies, meat, fish, cleaning materials) but either one was perfectly capable to bring milk, cookies, a quarter kilo of sliced ham and a box of eggs.
I still think that my mother would have been a better mother if she’d spent more time helping us with homework and less at Parenting School, but I’m not so sure any more. Things weren’t much better when she was around than when she wasn’t, and worse in some respects (the Bros respected my authority, but of course that only worked if I was “the grown up”, if I scolded one of them when she was around I’d get scolded in turn; Dad was a faster scolder than anybody else so the issue never had time to come up with him).
I find it pretty absurd that they raised us like that, yet Mom wishes we were completely dependent on her.
My parents were incredibly overprotective and even I had some instances where I would wear the key around my neck and walk home by myself. Which always makes me wonder about parents who claim they will never, ever let their kids be alone. It happens on this very board! My parents were exactly of that caliber but real life gets in the way. Mom and Dad both had to work.
