A latchkey kid , or latchkey child, is a child who returns from school to an empty home, or a child who is often left at home with little parental supervision, because their parent or parents are away at work.

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In the background of my youth, I heard this term once or twice. It was foreign and seemed to be applied to children that were exposed to risk and thus nothing like me.

I was very closely and carefully supervised until about the age of about seven, but descended quickly and abruptly into a wide gulf of adult unsupervision. In just one year, I would find myself walking a nontrivial distance home from school to an empty house. Weekday afternoons from 2:30pm until about 5:30pm left me stranded with the undeveloped devices of an eight year old. My afternoons were typically spent watching cartoons, plinking away on the computer, playing video games, or reorganizing my baseball card collection. Because of syndicated reruns and a frustratingly meager weekly allowance, I frequently had to invent ways to moderate my time and occupy myself:

(This actually wasn’t me. You see, my mother did not believe in sugar and so we never once had Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup in the fridge. If we did, it’s a certainty that I would have been doing this sort of thing, and also making chocolate milk sans kitchenware.)

There was, and still is, no shortage of latchkey kids in America, although it’s my understanding that they are not nearly as common as they used to be (see helicopter parents ). What perhaps makes my experience more unique is that my parents decided to send my younger sister and brother to after-school daycare—both are my junior by 2 and 3.5 years, respectively. Apparently the “too young to be left home alone” marker for our parents rested somewhere between the ages of six and eight. For my siblings, after-school care continued well into middle school, yet I have been increasingly on my own since the beginning of fourth grade.

Nobody ever told me that I was a latchkey kid, nor did I develop a sense that any adults around me actively made the observation. If one of them did, it was never verbalized in my presence. Likewise, if an admonition was ever issued to my parents then I cannot detect that it registered with them. This sort of thing was just normal. It was a little scary, but also a little cool. And now that I finally know what the term means, I realize that it would not be inappropriate to change the name of this site to ChadSpace, Chad “Latchkey Kid” Johnson’s Website.