If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s, you probably remember the house key on a string, the empty kitchen after school and the long hours of figuring things out alone. Psychologists now suggest that those quiet afternoons did more for your resilience than any parenting book ever could.
In short
- Psychology articles widely shared in Spanish-language media argue that the resilience of people born in the 1960s and 1970s has less to do with how they were raised than with how much time they spent alone.
- Many were “latchkey kids,” a term that became common in the 1970s and 1980s.
- Research on today’s highly involved parenting links it to lower feelings of autonomy and competence in young adults.
Picture this
It’s 3:30 p.m. in 1976. School is out, both parents are at work, and a 10-year-old lets herself in with a key worn around her neck. Nobody tells her what to do until dinner. She makes a snack, settles a fight with her brother and finishes her homework, or doesn’t. Nobody is tracking her on an app.
Not better parenting, more solitude
According to psychology articles circulating widely in Spain and Latin America, such as this one in La República, the resilience often attributed to this generation is not mainly about stricter or better parenting. It comes from the social context: parents who worked long hours, and children who spent “long periods of solitude” and had to solve everyday problems on their own.
Those small daily challenges, the articles argue, built emotional tools such as frustration tolerance, self-regulation and adaptability.
The latchkey generation
In the United States, these children had a name. As Wikipedia notes, the term “latchkey kid” became common in the 1970s and 1980s to describe Generation X, at a time when more mothers worked outside the home and childcare was not widely available.
Psychologists sometimes compare the effect to stress inoculation, a concept from cognitive-behavioral therapy described by psychologist Donald Meichenbaum: moderate, manageable doses of stress can help people build coping skills for bigger challenges later.
What changed with helicopter parenting
Research on the opposite style supports the idea. In a study of 297 American college students, Holly Schiffrin and colleagues at the University of Mary Washington found that “helicopter parenting” was linked to higher depression and lower life satisfaction, as well as lower feelings of autonomy and competence, as the study’s press release explains.
This is not the first time psychologists have looked back fondly on this generation, as our story on why people born between 1960 and 1970 had a uniquely free childhood showed. It also echoes the way analog habits, like writing plans in a paper calendar, seem to train the mind.
The limit
No single study has measured the resilience of an entire generation, and many children of the era also experienced real neglect or loneliness. Resilience depends on many factors, including support from at least one trusted adult.
The bottom line
If you were raised in the 1960s or 1970s, those empty afternoons may have been a hidden gift. Learning to be alone, it turns out, was also learning to cope.
