Results of Latchkey Study Are Surprising : Research Concludes Lack of Supervision Is Not Inherently Bad
Dad works, and so does Mom. Their children come home from school to an empty house, where they make merry, fool around or otherwise get in trouble.
Since there’s no one around to make the children do their homework, their grades suffer. Other possible problems are graver: teen-age pregnancy, car accidents, drinking and drug use.
That’s the popular stereotype of the miserable fate that befalls latchkey children--the estimated 2 million youths between 7 and 13 who are routinely without adult supervision for part of the day.
Recent research, however, says that being home alone may not be all that bad. The issue, in any case, is too complex to judge on approval-disapproval terms, experts say.
‘Automatically Bad’
“Before I did my study, I would have assumed that going home in a latchkey situation would be automatically bad,” said Deborah Vandell, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas. “But at least in the short term, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
Vandell evaluated the after-school plans of 349 suburban Dallas third-graders. These 8- and 9-year-old children had four different arrangements: going home to a parent, to a sitter, to an after-school program (primarily for-profit day-care centers) or home either alone or with an older sibling.
“One of the biggest surprises was the sheer number of latchkey kids,” Vandell said. “While nearly half--48%--went home to mother, 25% were in a latchkey situation.”
One of the most thorough surveys of child-care needs in the Washington area came up with a similar percentage. Conducted by Applied Management Sciences, a social policy research firm, the survey of Montgomery County, Md., households with children younger than 14 said 21% of these families regularly allowed their children to care for themselves or to be cared for by an under-14 sibling.
Number Increasing
In households where both adults worked full time, the latchkey figure was 42%. More than a quarter of the children were 8 or younger. Although these numbers are now three years old, “I would think these figures would have gone up, because the number of working moms is increasing,” said JoAnn Kuchak, a vice president at Applied.
Vandell used a variety of measures to construct her child-care profiles. Parents were asked not only how their children got along with them and their siblings and in school, but also their work and study skills and the amount of responsibility they had.
The children’s teachers were asked these same questions, and the children also evaluated their peers in terms of whom they liked and didn’t like to play with. In addition, the children were asked how they thought they were doing socially, academically and in general. Finally, standardized test scores and report-card grades were used.
The study’s conclusion: There were no differences in the parents’, the peers’ or the children’s own ratings between those who went home to mother and those in latchkey situations. Nor was there any difference in test scores between the two groups. Being a latchkey child did not appear to have hurt these third-graders.
“We did find a difference in those children who were going to the day-care centers,” Vandell said. “They were rated more negatively by their teachers and parents, and more of their classmates said they didn’t like to play with them. The only area they didn’t seem to be doing poorly in was their view of themselves.”
A further wrinkle came when separate analyses were done on two- and single-parent families that were using a sitter.
Money Matters
Going to a sitter in single-parent households was as bad as going to day care, Vandell said. “But in an intact family, it was like going home alone or to Mom.” She’s not sure why, but “it may be a function of money. A two-parent family with more money can get a better sitter.”
One possible reason for the surprising results in Dallas is that the after-school programs in the study were not of high quality and were spurned by the children.
“Those children who complain about going, and whose parents think are doing OK, start going home instead,” Vandell said. “There’s some self-selection here. The kids who seem to be doing fine go home, while the ones in trouble stay in the programs.”
Tom Long, a professor of education at Catholic University in Washington, agrees that children in less academically grounded child-care centers seem not to do as well.
“The center’s assumption is, ‘The kids have been in school, and we do other stuff.’ But if the kids spend much time there, the parents assume they did their homework,” he said. Control, Long said, is much greater if a parent is present or if there is a latchkey situation, where the parents often watch from afar.
The value of supervision was confirmed in a recent study of 865 Madison, Wis., children between the ages of 10 and 16.
Conducted by Laurence Steinberg, a professor of child and family studies at the University of Wisconsin, the survey said children who went home to an empty house after school were only slightly more susceptible to peer pressure for anti-social behavior than children who came home to a parent. One reason why: The parents kept in touch with the child from work.
Fewer Alternatives
For these older children, there are fewer alternatives to a latchkey situation. The day-care facilities open to Vandell’s third-graders--as poor as some of them may be --aren’t available in any form for teens and preteens.
“When you start looking for adult supervision past the sixth grade, it’s very difficult to come by,” Long said. “Children used to get support from extracurricular activities, but a lot of these have fallen by the wayside in a money crunch over the past 10 years.”
Another conclusion in Vandell’s study was that, if you eliminate going home to mother as an option, latchkey children were equally likely to be from higher-income families.
“I first thought that you might use a latchkey situation if you didn’t have financial resources” for a day-care center, she said. “But the wealthier families, if they weren’t going home to mom, were just as likely to be in a latchkey situation.”
The Applied study in Maryland came to a somewhat different conclusion. While 58% of the latchkey children in the county have at least one parent who completed graduate school--almost twice the county average--their households also have lower incomes. Nearly 54% of the latchkey families have incomes between $20,000 and $35,000; half the families in the county have incomes greater than that.
Some of these are single-parent families, which limits available income, said Kuchak of Applied. When both parents are present, they tend to be younger families that are on a fast track but haven’t got there yet.
“The kids are expected to carry their own weight--to be achievers,” Kuchak said. “The expectations of parents for their kids to be mature and independent may be higher today. And since the number of these working moms is increasing, the number of latchkey kids will also increase.”
While a latchkey setup may not be inherently bad, Long--a child psychologist, who, with his wife, Lynette, helped popularize the term latchkey children-- said that even older children need to be guided and instructed by adults.
“The assumption seems to be that by the time the kid is in sixth grade, he can take care of himself,” he said. “But if you start looking at things that could happen--things from obscene phone calls to drugs and alcohol that parents would be upset if they knew about--it’s an assumption that seems to be unsophisticated.”
Vandell likewise cautions that the long-term effect of being home alone may be different from just one year.
More Studies Needed
“Since this is their first year, the parents may be keeping close tabs,” she said. “This is not a carte blanche for children to be put in a latchkey situation, especially without supervision. Before anyone draws any firm kind of conclusion, we are going to need a number of studies done with a number of populations in different situations.”
Vandell said she views her findings as “reassurance, not an endorsement.”
“My study simply suggests that a latchkey situation isn’t necessarily bad for all children,” she said. “So perhaps the people feeling terribly guilty about it should feel better.”
