Psychology says the generation that raised itself - home alone after school, resolving its own problems, feeding itself from whatever was in the cupboard — didn't come out damaged. It came out with a startling tolerance for solitude that the generations before and after genuinely cannot replicate

I used to come home from school to an empty house every day. I was maybe eight or nine. The door was unlocked, or sometimes I had a key on a string around my neck. Nobody was there. Nobody was going to be there for hours.

I'd drop my bag on the floor, make myself a Vegemite sandwich with whatever bread was in the cupboard, and then just... exist. Watch television. Lie on the carpet and stare at the ceiling. Build things. Break things. Wander the backyard talking to myself. The hours between 3pm and 6pm were entirely mine, and nobody was supervising any of them.

At the time, it was just normal. Every kid I knew had the same deal. But looking back through the lens of what psychology now tells us about solitude, independence, and emotional development, those empty afternoons may have given me something that's genuinely hard to acquire any other way: the ability to be alone without it feeling like a crisis.

The latchkey generation

The term "latchkey kid" became common in the 1970s and 80s to describe children who came home to an empty house after school because both parents were working. As documented extensively, Generation X was described in a 2004 marketing study as one of the "least-parented, least-nurtured generations in U.S. history." The phenomenon was driven by rising divorce rates and increased maternal workforce participation at a time when after-school childcare options simply didn't exist at scale.

The assumption for years was that this was bad. That children left to their own devices would suffer. And for some, particularly very young children or those in unsafe environments, that was true. The research on this is mixed and context-dependent.

But here's what gets less attention: for a large number of those kids, the unsupervised hours didn't produce damage. They produced a specific psychological capacity that researchers are only now beginning to fully appreciate.

What solitude actually builds

In 1958, British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott published a short, groundbreaking paper called "The Capacity to Be Alone." As the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute explains, Winnicott argued that the ability to be alone is one of the most important signs of emotional maturity a person can develop. He distinguished it carefully from withdrawal and loneliness. This wasn't about isolation. It was about a positive capacity, a psychological skill that allows a person to exist in their own company without anxiety.

Winnicott's central insight was paradoxical: the capacity to be alone develops through the experience of being alone in the presence of someone reliable. A child who knows that a parent is around, even if that parent isn't actively engaging, gradually internalizes a sense of security. Over time, that internal security becomes portable. You can carry it with you into empty rooms and quiet evenings and long stretches of unstructured time without feeling abandoned.

Now, the latchkey experience wasn't exactly what Winnicott described. The parent wasn't in the next room. The parent was at work. But for many of these children, particularly those who knew they were loved and that the parent would return, something similar happened. The aloneness wasn't traumatic. It was practice. And the skill it built was real.

A study published in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality tested Winnicott's concept empirically by surveying 500 U.S. adults on their comfort with solitude. The researchers found that people who reported greater comfort being alone showed lower depression, fewer physical symptoms, and greater life satisfaction. The capacity to be alone wasn't just a nice personality trait. It functioned as a genuine psychological resource.

The generation that learned to self-soothe by accident

What the latchkey experience provided, for millions of children, was thousands of hours of unstructured solitary time during the exact developmental window when the brain is learning how to regulate itself.

There was no app. No scheduled activity. No parent narrating the experience or offering solutions. You were bored, and you had to figure out what to do about that. You were scared by a noise, and you had to calm yourself down. You were hungry, and you had to find something to eat. You were lonely, and you had to sit with that feeling until it passed or until you found a way to fill the time.

Each of those micro-experiences was a lesson in self-regulation. Not the kind of self-regulation you learn from a worksheet or a therapist. The kind you learn from sheer repetition, from doing it so many times that it stops being effortful and becomes automatic.

Psychologist Peter Gray, in a Harvard Graduate School of Education interview, connected this directly to what he calls "internal locus of control," the belief that you can influence what happens to you. He described how clinical questionnaires measuring this trait have been administered to children since the 1960s, and the results show a steady decline over the decades. As children's independent time decreased, so did their sense of personal agency. The two lines move in near-perfect parallel.

Gray's argument, supported by a major 2023 review he published in The Journal of Pediatrics, is that the systematic removal of unsupervised, self-directed time from childhood has contributed directly to rising rates of anxiety and depression in young people. The mechanism isn't complicated. If you never practice handling things on your own, you never develop the internal confidence that you can.

Why the generations before and after don't have this

The generation before the latchkey kids, broadly speaking, had stay-at-home mothers. Children came home to a managed environment. There was structure. There was supervision. There was comfort, but there was also less space for the kind of formative aloneness that builds solitude tolerance.

The generation after had something different but equally structured: organized activities. Soccer practice, tutoring, music lessons, playdates with scheduled start and end times. And eventually, smartphones, which ensured that even when a child was physically alone, they were never truly alone with their own thoughts.

The latchkey generation sits in a narrow historical window where the conditions were exactly right (or exactly wrong, depending on your perspective) for producing adults who are genuinely comfortable in their own company. Not because anyone planned it. But because the economic and social realities of the 1970s and 80s created a situation where millions of children were left alone long enough, and often enough, to develop an interior life that didn't depend on external stimulation.

I think about this in my own life in Saigon. I can sit on my balcony for an hour watching motorbikes and thinking about nothing, and it feels like a luxury, not a punishment. My wife sometimes looks at me during those stretches and asks if I'm okay. I'm more than okay. I'm in the most natural state I know.

That capacity didn't come from wisdom or discipline. It came from hundreds of empty afternoons where nobody was home and I had to learn, by default, how to be my own company. It came from boredom so deep it eventually turned into something else: a relationship with silence that I didn't know was valuable until I realized that not everyone has it.

The cost and the gift

I don't want to romanticize this. Some latchkey kids were genuinely neglected. Some were scared. Some were in unsafe situations. The research is clear that context matters enormously, and that younger children and those in unstable homes were more vulnerable to negative outcomes.

But for the vast middle, the kids who had a basically functional home life and parents who were simply at work, the experience produced something specific and measurable: a comfort with solitude that functions as a psychological asset across the entire lifespan.

In my Buddhist practice, solitude isn't a problem to be solved. It's a space where insight becomes possible. You can't hear your own mind if you're constantly surrounded by noise. You can't understand your own patterns if you never sit still long enough to observe them. The capacity to be alone isn't the opposite of connection. It's the foundation of the kind of connection that actually means something.

Winnicott understood this decades ago. He wrote that the capacity to be alone is not opposed to the ability to be with others. It's complementary. The people who can tolerate solitude are often the people who bring the most depth to their relationships, because they come to those relationships out of genuine desire, not out of the anxiety of being left with themselves.

The latchkey generation learned this in the most unglamorous way imaginable: alone in a quiet house, eating toast, waiting for someone to come home. Nobody designed it as a lesson. But it was one of the most important lessons a lot of us ever learned.