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Once again, everyone is forgetting Gen X 😁
Latchkey kids. The backlash to the (perception) of emotional and psychological neglect, not physical abuse. Parents who provided for their children's material needs but were literally or emotionally absent, distant, unengaged so the children were left to raise themselves.
This then led to calls for Something Must Be Done, which is where the legal repercussions for "unsupervised children" came in:
Look at the parents in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (a movie which I loathed the first time I saw it and continue to loath because I think Ferris is an absolute brat whom I would love to beat senseless). The kids there are in their late teens, almost adults, so there is not the same ramifications as allowing a set of twelve year olds to roam around the city without adult supervision. It also allows for his mother to leave him home alone when she believes him to be ill, because he's old enough to look after himself (his mother doesn't need to go out to work so it's not due to the family's socio-economic situation that she is absent). But look at the parents in their lives: the ones most closely associated are the authority figures such as the school principal, not their parents. Ferris' parents are benignly neglectful, easily fooled by their son (whom they don't know well enough to realise he's chronically truant from school). Cameron's parents, or at least the only one we hear of (his mother is conspicuous by absence of any reference) are malignly neglectful, his father being a figure of fear but also absent from his son's life. Sloane's parents seem to be so invisible, that Ferris simply dressing up in a bad disguise is enough to pass as her father when he's getting her out of school.
The movie ends with an alliance between the hitherto hostile siblings and Ferris' parents remaining in their state of happy ignorance. The entire plot relies on the assumption "your parents won't know because they're not around enough to be involved in your life and know what is going on with you". Ferris is cocky and unlikeable (to me anyway) and gets away with it because the one adult aware of his behaviour is rendered powerless to do anything about it. But a deeper reading would indicate Ferris is like this because of lack of parental involvement; the only one aware of what is going on and trying to hold him accountable is his older sister. His parents are kind fools, even though (presumably) they are successful adults in the world of work and society. They are unaware of what their son is really doing and in a way don't care enough to find out, maybe he pulls off stunts like this because at least if he's caught and they hold him accountable, they're active in his life. Ferris is still a child, or at least immature; his Big Plan to reset the car's odometer and keep Cameron's dad ignorant fails horribly. It's the first actual consequence to their actions that happens, and even though it's the catalyst for Cameron to confront his father, we never see the fall-out of that. So we're left with "Ferris had a great time and successfully got away with it all", and no follow-up on "but what happened to Cameron and Sloane?"
And since the movie is set in the week before they graduate high school, they'll all be going off to begin their adult lives, to be out of the family home, to formally separate from their parents, and there will never be that opportunity for them to be seen as who they are.
Oh, well: that was too deep for a fun movie very much of its time.
There's a term I haven't heard in a while. But I do remember hearing a lot about it in the early 90s, including, iirc, actual TV commercials denigrating it, presumably paid for by some kind of advocacy group.
The simple explanation is that they don’t exist anymore.
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Discourse on the latch key phenomenon only briefly occured in the 50s-60s in Sweden and didn't amount to much. It completely died down once the municipalities were required to offer after school activities.
As far as I'm aware the majority of kids just went home anyway and that was completely normalised. Practically everyone had a key and went home before their parents from like age 10.
This has been going on for some 60 years now without any drama.
Same here in Finland except from 7-8 years old unless one parent was stay at home or had only a part time job. We were surprised when we found out kids in US stayed so late at after school activities and figured it’d be very exhausting if we had to also do that.
I'm an American. Starting age 9 I had my own key. I biked from school to home. Sometimes took the bus. Got home a lot earlier than my parents.
I came home first after walking from Elementary school and just opened the door because it was unlocked almost all the time. We never had a break-in.
Lest this seem too idyllic, my parents did start locking up when an old woman up the street was murdered in a home invasion.
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