Meaning
A child who comes home from school to an empty house, letting themselves in with the key hung round their neck - the everyday badge of two working parents or one, and the standard shorthand for a generation's self-reliance. Sociological and slightly nostalgic; for its Generation X subjects the phrase is a badge as often as a complaint. Regional use: General English; North American origin.
Origin
The war coined the label and the 1970s revived it. The first documented use is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio discussion of 1942 - how war affects Canadian children - where panelists discuss the latchkey kid as slang already familiar: fathers enlisted, mothers in the factories, children wearing house keys on strings. The phrase then described Generation X wholesale as divorce rose and both parents worked before outside childcare caught up; a 1984 documentary called such children day orphans, and a 2004 marketing study judged them one of the least-parented, least-nurtured generations in American history - middle-class homes where the odds of self-care increased, oddly, with the parents' education. The standing definition covers children from about five to thirteen who care for themselves after school until the adults return; the key under the mat and the key on the string remain the phrase's whole iconography.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a latchkey generation
- latchkey child
- latchkey kids
Usage Examples
- A latchkey kid of the seventies, she could produce supper, a fire plan, and forged parental notes by age nine.
- The school's after-hours club exists, the head says, so that no one is a latchkey kid twice in one week.
- He credits the latchkey years for his cooking, his caution with kettles, and his vivid memory for sirens.