latchkey kid

latchkey kid

A child who is home alone after school or in general because their parents or guardians are at work. I know it makes me sound horrible, but I just don't want Tommy hanging out with those latchkey kids from down the road. Being a latchkey kid was tough at times, but it taught me the value of self-reliance at an earlier age than most.
See also: kid, latchkey
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • latchkey
  • latchkey child
  • stand the sight of (someone or something)
  • bear the sight of (someone or something)
  • I never!
  • well I never!
  • (well,) I never!
  • sound asleep
  • boom out
  • jangle
References in periodicals archive
She had been a latchkey kid on a sinkhole Vienna housing estate, who often came home alone and went to bed when her mother Brigitta was still out.
If I didn't have to spend half my salary making sure my daughter was looked after and my son wasn't a latchkey kid, I'd be all over 70s-inspired suede or Victoriana.
But he's also a neglected latchkey kid, leading Mel to lodge a complaint with child welfare authorities.
(He was a lonely, latchkey kid who tried, in vain, to adopt a puppy.) But those explanations aren't necessary.
Off the field, Williams didn't feel as much at home, growing up a latchkey kid in a broken home in San Diego, divorcing three times and often being absent as a father.
The phrase latchkey kid, a media scare term two decades ago, has all but vanished from the press.
AND SO IT GOES, WITH ALEXANDER PLAYING the role of latchkey kid caught between an abusive mother (the 104th Congress, with its Contract With America) and a vaguely well-meaning, but always absent dad (Bill Clinton, who's busy enough with his own problems).
Despite that fact, NBC has actually had the most success with laffers in recent years, launching hits "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" as well as the acclaimed "30 Rock." In the 1980s, when Silverman was a self-described latchkey kid enamored of TV, network execs similarly declared the sitcom a dead format--until "The Cosby Show" came along.
Her child isn't a latchkey kid. She was, in fact, present when her 2-year-old child was watching a police drama that no 2-year-old could possibly understand, even if it contained not a single shootout.
What with mom (Karen Chilton) regularly pulling double-shifts, latchkey kid Drey could use a little substitute parenting--even from Dunne.
..a Canadian journalist ...over The Latchkey Kid, said what did this frail old lady know about life?
As a latchkey kid of working-class Irish immigrants, she dove into song after school to avoid the "social desolation" of her Manhattan neighborhood in the 1950s.
My 22-year-old son was a latchkey kid. I often had to work beyond a 39-hour week.
A rare Taiwanese move away from navel-gazing, "Bear Hug" is a warmhearted, surprisingly unsentimental view of families fractured by geography and opportunity, mostly from the p.o.v, of a 9-year-old latchkey kid. Pic should be a smash on the kid-fest circuit and is worth a look for arthouses ready to go further afield.
Recalling her own childhood as a latchkey kid, her mother, a computer programmer, went back to work when she was three, she said: "I never wanted that for my daughter.