#i'd accept this behavior from like middle schoolers but no more

[navree]

imma be real with you...being a latchkey kid was the highlight of my 90s childhood. video rentals after school, maybe riding bikes around the neighborhood park, inviting schoolmates or neighbor kids over to play videogames until the parents came home and the streetlights went on. was it lonely? occasionally, but it was never THAT BAD™️ to the point of leaving me moping in a corner. hate to sound like a boomer...but kids today are soft.

Like, the thing is, I'm not a millennial, but I'm definitely on the older side of Gen Z by being born in early 1999, and this trend of "latchkey kid" stuff is BAFFLING to me. Like, parentification and child neglect are real things, with real and negative impacts on the children involved, but that's not what people are talking about half the time; they're literally just talking about being left alone on occasion. And it feels like a lot of it comes from two places: 1) from people who didn't actually have two parents who worked and so view the idea that sometimes kids are left alone or with babysitters as akin to child abuse (I made mention of this with one of my complaint about Tim Drake fans wanting his parents to be abusive because they went on business trips for work, y'all clearly had stay at home parents because otherwise that concept would not be shocking) or 2) from people who, I'm sorry, want to feel more put upon than they actually were either because they want to be more interesting or because they feel aggrieved and are grasping for a legitimate reason for it. Maybe I'm mean and crochety but you were not, in fact, criminally treated because sometimes your parents weren't around. My dad went on months long business trips for work when I was a kid, he missed multiple birthdays of mine, my parents both working meant that a lot of times during summers my sister and I were put under the care of babysitters until I was twelve and deemed old enough to be in charge and we were thus left alone. And that was occasionally an issue, because it wasn't nice to have a parent miss a birthday or sometimes the babysitter was definitely not a right fit (we still make jokes about a sitter my sister absolutely hated) or situations arose where an adult was needed (like my sister locking herself in our bathroom by accident, where the lack of readily available adults meant I ended up calling 911 about it, it's a story my parents love me to tell and did result in some rule changes in our house regarding when doors are allowed to be locked and when you should be calling emergency services vs just leaving a message for mom). But it didn't mentally scar me or make me feel abused. The only material consequence it left me with was that by high school I was coming home first cuz my school was within walking distance from my house and therefore I was the first one returning to our dog who had been bereft of human companionship for the day and it made me his favorite for a time.

I also feel like a lot of this also comes from a recent need to pathologize everything. It's something I've noticed with that fucking eldest daughter shit people do, where there's a legitimate idea at the root of it (ie that the eldest child does have to put up with more stuff than younger siblings and if that child is a daughter that gets compounded with societal misogyny and the expectations placed on women and girls and their roles) then balloons outward into this thing where every eldest daughter on the planet has suddenly suffered more than Jesus. And again, as an Eldest Daughter, I am intimately aware of how my being the first born influenced my upbringing; I was far more harshly treated than my sister because my parents didn't know while raising me what was normal behavior for my age vs what was behavior that was unacceptable, whereas they had a baseline for when she reached similar milestones. But it's not something that's left me rocking back and forth and in need of psychiatric care, any more than being left alone did. And with latchkey kid stuff, it's doubly stupid because it really feels like it comes from a position of privilege. Most families need dual income, most families need both parents to be working, and as such that means that sometimes most families are going to need to rely on childcare or, eventually, leaving the kid in charge of themselves for some afternoons. And most kids understand that, the reason I find this shit stupid is because I'm aware of the fact that my parents not being around sometimes was due to the fact that they were doing their jobs, so that we could all live, because that's how the world works especially when you have children and are thus responsible for them as well as yourself. But now everything needs to be some Big Deep Issue, so the fact that a two parent household will involve two parents who either need to work or honestly want to work (don't think I'm not missing that a lot of this stuff completely ignores that mothers should be entirely able to return to the workforce and have their own independent lives outside of being wives and mothers, cuz I see it) is now a harmful thing to do to one's children. Completely ignoring, of course, the lived experience of people over the age of 20 who were "latchkey kids" and were completely fine with it, or even view those early moments of freedom as fundamental happy memories and part of their journey into becoming their own person.