Latchkey Kids
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.
