A renewed respect for the 'latchkey kids' of the 1970s and '80s

On a recent out-of-state college visit, my youngest daughter and I experienced a scene that is best described as the Brigade of the Packages.

Several delivery people entered the dorm we were touring, each of them weighted down by a pile of tightly wrapped mystery bundles. They laid the brown packages against a wall and disappeared.

"What are those?" we asked the cheery tour guide.

"Students' clean laundry," she said.

I caught my daughter's eye with a look that said not-on-your-life. It was unnecessary, of course, because she knows there's no way in H.E. Double Hockey Sticks this extravagant perk is going to be part of her college experience.

If it seems a stretch to segue from that 21st-century college encounter to a column about 20th-century latchkey kids, please indulge me for a minute.

Remember latchkey kids — those supposedly neglected children left to their own devices in the 1970s and 1980s with nothing but a box of Vanilla Wafers, a house key and endless hours to roam, read or watch After School Specials like "Me and My Hormones"?

I'll bet I'm not the only recovering helicopter parent wondering if we might rethink our largely ungenerous attitude toward them.

For years, researchers, psychologists, teachers and grandparents warned of the dangers of children as young as age 6 being left unsupervised at home after school. Now many are mulling how we might instill some of that independence and self-reliance in our own progeny.

The Washington Post reported recently that nearly 40 percent of millennials consider cereal "an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it." That came on the heels of a Braun study revealing that only 28 percent of kids today are required to do chores, compared with 82 percent of their parents when they were kids.

Out-of-state schools aren't the only institutions of higher learning offering freedom from laundry detergent. The University of St. Thomas recently partnered with Laundry Doctor to offer drop-and-go professional laundering services. While some said it will allow students more time to study, one commenter wondered if the announcement was better suited to a satirical publication like the Onion.

Latchkey kids may or may not have done their own laundry, but they knew how to put a dish in the dishwasher and lock a door.

"I was a latchkey kid," said Julie Lythcott-Haims, former freshmen dean at Stanford University and author of a new bestseller, "How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kids for Success."

In other words, she did OK.

She was in fifth grade when her mother returned to work full-time. With her father also working full-time, the 11-year-old often ate breakfast alone, watched the "Today" show, then locked the door behind her and off to school she went.

"In the afternoons," Lythcott-Haims said, "I let myself in. If I couldn't find my key, I had to figure that out. I developed self-sufficiency, responsibility. It was great."

When Lythcott-Haims became a dean in 2002, she quickly realized that self-sufficiency was not exactly the operative mission of parents of today's college kids. They wanted to help with course selection or to complain about their childrens' grades.

Lythcott-Haims developed a respectful but firm response: "Look," she'd say, "this is college. Without a chance to spread their wings, our children will be fearful of the world."

Then one night after a lecture on that subject, she returned home and caught herself cutting her 10-year-old son's meat. "There are a whole lot of skills a human learns between cutting meat and going to college," she realized. "That's when I shifted from being a dean who was somewhat critical to being a dean who had compassion for what parents were experiencing."

She didn't have to look further than her own childhood for inspiration to change gears. "We are quite proud to be folks who gained a good measure of independence and a sense of self," she said.

The shift in thinking around latchkey kids isn't new. A small and buried study from 1991 reported that these kids did "about as well socially and emotionally as youngsters receiving adult supervision." The best scenario, the researchers found, is when children could have contact with their parents during their alone time.

In the late 1990s, Deborah Belle, a psychologist at Boston University, wrote "The After-School Lives of Children: Alone and With Others While Parents Work," which suggested that being left home alone "may be a better alternative than staying with baby-sitters or older siblings."

Some children, she found, even experienced "a sense of fun" in being home alone. While self-care was a lonely experience for some children, "it was a richly supported one" for others. That likely explains the increasing media interest in the issue.

Getting to age-appropriate, confidence-building self-care well before college requires, first, a shift in semantics, Lythcott-Haims believes.

"If someone says, 'I can't believe you let your daughter take the train,' we need to say, 'No, I'm teaching her how to take public transportation.' "

Then we need to step back, which is hard. "We have to take an interest in our children developing skills, like talking to strangers, managing a deadline, making food, walking places alone, buying something in a store," she said.

Might I add doing their own laundry, too?

"They're not learning," said Lythcott-Haims of modern kids, "because we're doing it all for them. Our job as parents is to put ourselves out of a job."

gail.rosenblum@startribune.com 612-673-7350 • Twitter: @grosenblum