Latchkey Kid

A latchkey kid is a child who is regularly left at home without adult supervision after school or other activities, whether alone or with similarly unsupervised siblings. The term originated in a 1942 CBC radio program describing the effect of the Second World War on Canadian children, when fathers left for military service and mothers entered the workforce with little childcare available to replace them. It became a widely used description of children in the nineteen seventies and eighties, a period marked by rising divorce rates and greater maternal workforce participation without a matching expansion of childcare, and research on the period found that this generation, mostly from middle and upper class households, was among the least supervised in American history during its formative years. The phenomenon reflected broader shifts in family structure and the economy rather than poverty, which distinguishes it from earlier forms of unsupervised childhood. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/