Latch Key Kids

When I was 9 years old, my mother decided I was old enough to keep myself and my brother for two hours after school.

She worked a full-time job in a nearby city, and did not come home until 6 p.m. My father's hours varied so much we never knew when he would be home.

For a time, we stayed with an older woman. Her name was Dorathea and she lived in a little white house not far from us. I got along with her. I did whatever chores she asked of me, then did my homework if I hadn't finished it on the bus, then read whatever books she had in her bookcase. It was there I first read Victoria Holt, books not exactly suited for my age group. 

My brother, however, was a bit of a troublemaker, and I think Dorathea didn't want us to return. Up the street a ways were the Stewarts. Two of them were teenagers, and one was a year younger than I. We stayed with them sometimes, but after it was obvious I could take care of us, we just exited the bus at our house.

I'm not sure when the term "latch key" kids came into being, but that is what we were. I was the big sister in charge. We each had chores. My father raised a variety of birds - chickens, quail, and other things. My brother's job was to feed them and water them. I was in charge of keeping the stove going, That meant fetching kindling and wood.

We had a pile of boards that came from somewhere, and since I wasn't supposed to use the axe, I would place the boards at an angle against a log and jump in the middle of them to snap them so I could get them into the stove. I couldn't handle the big logs one needs to bank a fire, but we heated with a wood stove and an oil furnace, so it was necessary to keep the fire going. We weren't supposed to turn the oil furnace up.

We arrived home from school about 3:50 p.m. It was a long bus ride as school let out at 3 p.m. My first chore was to make a collect call to my mother's office. I would ask for her, and she would say there was no one there by that name and reject the call. But she heard my voice on the other end and knew we were ok. Sometimes, though, what she heard was something like, "Mom, she's not letting me watch TV and I've done my homework," to which she would respond, "Behave yourselves" before rejecting the call. You could do that back then, back in 1972. At least you could around here.

At some point, the phone company changed it so that calls to the city were no longer long distance, so we didn't have to do that. I just came home and called and let her know everything was ok. We had worked out a code so I could tell her something was wrong. She worried about someone breaking into the house and being there when we arrived. I was supposed to tell this person that if I didn't call my mother right away, she would call the police, and then I was to call and tell her something like, "My brother Jack missed the bus," so she would know something was wrong (since I don't have a brother Jack). That's not the secret sentence, I've forgotten it, but it was something like that.

After we gathered kindling, fed the birds, fed the fire, and picked up around the house - I think I was washing clothes by this time so I would start a load of laundry, too - we were supposed to do our homework. Generally, though, I did my homework on the bus, so I didn't have that much to do. Instead, I would read or watch TV.

I remember one afternoon I decided I would make dinner. I was younger than 12. I don't remember what I fixed, but I set the table, made the meal, etc., so that when my mother came home, everything was done. She said nothing to me about it. No thank you, no good job. She just came in and ate and told me to clean up.

Later I asked her if she even noticed what I'd done. She said of course she had, but no one ever thanked her, so why should I expect to be thanked?

After that, I despised cooking and have ever since. Since I could do it, it became expected, and while I didn't cook on nights I had piles of homework, I frequently threw casseroles or whatever my mother left in the refrigerator in the oven. These were the days of frozen TV dinners and ready made meals. But I got out of cooking as much as I could, and since homework came first, I stopped doing my homework on the bus so I'd have to do it at home. Lots of times we just ate a sandwich and I was fine with that. If my father was home, he expected a nice meal, and my mother usually fixed that when she came home from work, so the days he was home I did not cook. I made no secret of my dislike for cooking.

There we were, me with my brother who was three years younger than I, staying by ourselves in a house with a woodstove when I was 9 years old. I don't know that it hurt us. We had chores we had to do, and if we didn't do them, we were punished, so we did them. I don't recall too many bad things happening - seems like I jumped on one of those pieces of wood one time and had it fly up and hit me in the face - and there were splinters and such to deal with, but we just did it. And we learned to deal with whatever came along, whether that was the chickens getting out or learning how to rebuild the fire in the woodstove.

I don't know if there are still latchkey kids - I assume so - but I also know helicopter parenting seems to have taken over. Maybe latchkey kids are called "free range" kids now. 

It didn't do us any harm, really. I was grown up when I was born, or so it seems, so this was just a part of it.