Efforts to Aid Latchkey Children Growing

Stefanie, 10, and Sabrina, 11, have spent a lot of time taking care of themselves at home this summer. One day they got so bored that they reinvented the wheel--the Wheel of Fortune, that is.

They explained their homemade version of the television game show in an afternoon call to Leslie Shapiro of PhoneFriend, a year-old local hot line for “latchkey children”--those who are unsupervised until their parents arrive home, usually from work.

As the number of single-parent families and working mothers continues to rise, concern about child care for preschoolers has broadened to include school-age children as well.

Programs Sprout Up

And, in the absence of large-scale federal legislation that specifically addresses the issue, programs like PhoneFriend have sprouted up around the nation as part of a grass-roots effort to provide assistance to a growing number of latchkey children through a variety of public and private contributions.

Spreading the burden of providing for school-age child care among parents, their employers and all levels of government is seen by child-care advocates as the fastest and most pragmatic approach to a situation that has reached enormous proportions. The U.S. Census Bureau has estimated that about 2 million children between the ages of 7 and 13 routinely are left alone for at least part of the day; other estimates put the number as high as 10 million.

“We need all the players,” said Yale University psychologist Edward Zigler, who headed the federal Office of Child Development under President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. “Going hat in hand to the Congress and to the state Legislature in Sacramento is a very nice thing, but the money didn’t appear then and it’s not going to appear now.”

Such sentiment has led many local officials to organize programs of their own. PhoneFriend, for example, began a few years ago as a community project aimed at helping to keep latchkey children safe, assuage their fears, loneliness or boredom and give them something constructive to do. Since then, more than 30 similar services have sprouted up nationwide, including one in Orange County.

Up to 700 Calls

Channing Wickham, executive director of Washington’s PhoneFriend, said the line received 600 to 700 calls a month during the last school year, most of them from children in public schools. Of the system’s 60,000 students, she estimates, about a third are latchkey children.

“Most of these kids are very, very bored,” Wickham said.

Under another local program aimed at assisting latchkey children, Washington city officials have kept elementary schools open late to accommodate after-school programs that are administered by parental groups. Parents pay for the supervision, and the schools pick up the operational costs of staying open longer than usual.

In Los Angeles, all of 410 public elementary school playgrounds are kept open and supervised for two hours after the final bell. As in Washington, the district provides space in some schools for programs run by groups such as the PTA and YMCA, but it charges them the cost of keeping the buildings open.

California has the nation’s most ambitious statewide program for latchkey children and is “light years ahead of other states,” said Michelle Seligson, director of the School-Age Child Care Project, a program in Wellesley, Mass.