The truth about latchkey kids

Gen Xers like to boast about being left unsupervised after school. But there was a grim side to it that has left many determined not to repeat the sins of their parents.

IN HER 2017 NETFLIX SPECIAL, “Christina P: Mother Inferior”, the comedian Christina Pazsitsky (b. 1976) jokes about all the wild stuff Gen X had to deal with — “crazy stuff like crack cocaine, and AIDS, and Friends.” She also makes light of having been a latchkey kid, laughing about how,  if you were lucky, you might just be still alive by the time your mom came home. 

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. It is something that was endured, or survived, even possibly to our benefit: if you believe the marketing hype, the latchkey generation is tougher, more resilient, adventurous, and open to risk-taking than the snowflake Millennials who came up behind us. 

But whatever pride there may be is often leavened by a great deal of bitterness, usually over absentee parents who (it is thought) put their own needs and priorities ahead of those of their kids. For example, the 45 year-old American writer/podcaster/comedian Bridget Phetasy set a certain precinct of the Twitterverse aflame last month with a piece about that most Gen X of topics, namely,  her parents’ divorce when she was twelve. The essay, published in the Spectator, is entitled “How divorce never ends”, and it is a long, angry, bitter rant about the price Phetasy and her siblings paid for the divorce, and how they are still shelling out for it well into their own middle age. 

For a lot of Gen Xers, it’s a familiar story. After Phetasy’s parents split, they each quickly found new partners. Her mom moved to a different city with her new husband (who, we are told, was insane). What followed was an teenage wasteland marked by logistical nightmares, financial struggles, psychological manipulation, and, more than anything, outright abandonment. One of the most amazing anecdotes, in an essay that is largely just a string of amazing anecdotes, involves an aunt coming over and finding the kids scarfing down handfuls of raw pasta. “Feed your kids, they are starving!” her aunt lectures her father. “ About which Phetasy dryly says, “although we weren’t literally starving, it would have been nice to have had a sandwich once in a while.”  

What is interesting about Phetasy’s piece, in many ways, is just how unremarkable it is — the I-was-abandoned-by-my-divorced-parents has been its own genre of Gen X lit for a while now. For example, in 2011, the journalist Susan Gregory Thomas wrote an essay for the WSJ called “The divorce generation”, where she describes the effects of her own parents’ split, with much of the same fence-sitting between exhilaration and reproach:

Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments every other weekend.

Both Phetasy and Thomas make a direct link between two trends that marked the identities of their generation: skyrocketing divorce rates, and the rise of what became known as “latchkey kids” — children who return home after school and are left unsupervised until a parent comes home from work.  There was widespread concern about the situation at the time, and the received wisdom was that it was on the whole a bad thing. But as one might suspect, the truth is a bit more complicated. 

To begin with, the two phenomena were very real. By the early 1990s, there were something like 3.5 million latchkey kids in the U.S., or seven per cent of those between the ages of 5 and 13. 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. 

But interestingly, there is no clear link to be found between being a latchkey kid and social or emotional damage. It is true, one study found that latchkey children showed more hyperactivity and certain types of misbehaviour than kids who came home to a parent or other adult caregiver. But these effects disappeared when the researchers controlled for emotional support and for income. 

In fact, two major studies done in the 1990s found that latchkey children did about as well, socially and emotionally, as their peers who received adult supervision following the end of the school day. What seemed to matter was not the type of care per se, the presence or absence of a grownup, but rather the overall quality of kids’ family life. That is, it isn’t whether kids are alone or not, it’s what they are up to when alone, and whether there is any monitoring, support, and discipline. Which is just to point out the obvious, which is that the distinction between being supervised and unsupervised is not so clear cut. Does a parent check in? Is there a neighbour nearby to call on? An older sibling? What sort of household rules are in place? Are they enforced?

This makes intuitive sense. There is a world of difference between a kid coming home after school to find a note from a parent on the counter that says “dinner is on the stove, I’ll be home at 5:30” versus a kid who comes home to an empty fridge and no sense of when anyone will be home, and is left to fend for themself. Indeed, according to one study, many kids found the alone time after school to be empowering. They liked the solitude and the responsibility, and didn’t always like it when a parent repeatedly called to check in on them. No, going home to be alone wasn’t necessarily the problem – often, the real trouble was found elsewhere. 

According to one Canadian study by two researchers at the University of Victoria, one area of concern was girls who spent unstructured and unsupervised time not at home, but instead just  “hanging out” with friends. This group reported more problem behaviours (smoking, drinking, shoplifting) compared to their supervised female peers, and more problems than all the boys in the study. (See our previous post on peer pressure, for more on this).

The other area where problems arose was with children who returned home to single mothers after school. Members of this group experienced more anxiety, misbehaviour and conflicts with other children than did kids who received supervision from other adults after school. The study’s authors don’t have a full explanation for why this might be the case, but they speculated that some single mothers “endure considerable stress and may have few psychological resources to offer a child after school.”

Which brings us full circle, and back to what seems, for many Gen Xers, to be the source of the real trauma – their parents’ divorce. One of the more disturbing aspects of Phetasy’s article is not the details of her and her siblings’ neglect, or even how damaged she was as a child by the divorce, but how much of it she is still carrying with her. As she goes on to say in the essay, both she and her husband still bear the marks of their respective parents’ splitups, most notably, the rage she feels over having to juggle the neediness of four sets of grandparents who want access to her own kids: “I get furious at the idea that I’m still taking care of these boomers emotionally, over thirty years later.” If the replies on her Twitter feed are any indication, a lot of people feel the same way. 

Ultimately, the long term consequences of all this will be borne out by how Gen Xers have ended up parenting their own kids. If our parents sinned through neglect, are we simply making the opposite error, by overcorrecting? A while ago, the writer and college administrator Julie Lythcott-Haims wrote a piece for Time that described the precise moment the scales fell from her eyes: After a long day spent trying to convince helicopter parents to back off and leave their kids to experience college on their own, she sat down at the dinner table and instinctively reached over to start cutting her kids’ meat: “If you want your kid to be independent at 18, at some point you have to stop cutting their meat. I sat bolt upright. When do you stop cutting their meat?”

This is probably the great parenting conundrum for Gen Xers. Having suffered the loneliness of abandonment, many of are now determined not to let our own kids out of our sight. It will be interesting to track the implications.