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Cynthetiq · 08-14-2008, 01:17 PM

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View: Children Left Alone at Home, Worriedly
Source: NYTimes
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Children Left Alone at Home, Worriedly
August 14, 2008
Children Left Alone at Home, Worriedly
By LISA W. FODERARO

Alison Borzacchiello, a stay-at-home mother from Queens, needed something new to wear to a wedding, so she set out a few weeks ago for Estelle’s Dressy Dresses in Farmingdale, N.Y. That was hardly momentous.

What made it worthy of note is that she did not take her 11-year-old son, Nicky, along. He has just reached that awkward age when he is old enough to stay home alone, but not without a good deal of angst for both parent and child.

“All the while I was out, I kept looking at the watch and listening for my phone,” she said. “He called me four times in an hour: ‘When are you coming home? Where are you? Are you on line yet? Did you leave the store yet?’ It made me so nervous, I just browsed and left.”

Many parents with young children dream of the day they can walk out the door without a baby sitter, turning a stroll with the dog or a trip to the bank into an exhilarating adventure. But unlike so many aspects of child care that are clearly laid out by pediatrician’s decree or government regulation, this is a rite of passage without clear guidelines. New York, like most states, has no law stipulating an age of aloneness, though parents can be charged with reckless endangerment if tragedy befalls children while they are home without supervision.

“There’s no definition,” said Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. “There are child-safety experts who believe some 10-year-olds are quite O.K. alone and others who would tell you that there are some 14-year-olds they wouldn’t leave alone.”

Child-welfare experts say that many low-income parents have few choices but to leave children unattended while working. But for middle-class and wealthy New Yorkers, standards vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, spawning lively dinner-party debates and much judgment-passing at other people’s choices. (“I know people who left their children alone when the oldest was 8 and there was a 4-year-old and 6-year-old,” one person interviewed for this article said with barely concealed disdain.)

It is a quandary that raises questions about safety, maturity, class, cultural traditions and peer pressure, with summer often complicating things, since children usually have more free time and many after-school child care programs are unavailable.

While technology — especially cellphones — has made it easier for a child to get help, families today also confront a culture filled with frightening possibilities, both real and imagined, outside the door (think sex-offender registries and “The Lovely Bones”). And the safety nets that have evolved in recent decades (smoke detectors, 911) also remind parents of all the things that can go wrong.

“It’s extremely stressful,” said Christine Rivera of Lynbrook, N.Y., who has a 12-year-old son, Charles, whom she started leaving home alone two years ago. “At that point you’re not there to watch over them. They’re left to their own devices and the perils of the world.”

When Ms. Rivera, a marketing manager for Microsoft, first let Charles go home to an empty house after school, they were living in Queens and she was adamant that he stay inside behind locked doors until she got home at 6:30. Play dates were out. She has loosened up on his whereabouts, but not her knowledge of them.

“Now that we’ve moved to Long Island, he calls me when he gets home from school and calls me when he wants to go to a friend’s house and again when he gets to the friend’s house,” she said. “When he doesn’t call when he’s supposed to, he gets punished. He can’t go out the next day.”

A 2003 study by Child Trends, a nonprofit research group in Washington, estimated that three million children nationwide under the age of 13 — some as young as 5 — were left to care for themselves for at least a few hours a week on a regular basis.

While most states are silent on the issue, Maryland specifies an age — 8 — under which it is illegal for a child to be left without a baby sitter who is “reliable” and “at least 13 years old.” Others, like Connecticut, offer some guidance: its child welfare agency’s Web site advises that “experts believe a child should be at least 12 before he is left alone, and at least 15 before he can care for a younger brother or sister.”

Safe Kids USA, a nonprofit advocacy organization in Washington that seeks to prevent accidental injury and death, also sees 12 as a turning point.

“Children under age 12 don’t have the cognitive ability to recognize risk and, just as important, don’t have the cognitive maturity to react to the risk or accident once it happens,” said Alan Korn, the group’s director of public policy and general counsel. “That concern is heightened when there are other children in the home. So many injuries and deaths can be prevented by appropriate, active adult supervision.”

In 2003, Kim Brathwaite was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment after her two children, ages 9 and 1, were killed in a fire while alone in their Canarsie, Brooklyn, apartment. Ms. Brathwaite told the authorities that her baby sitter had not shown up and that she decided to go to work anyway so as not to jeopardize her new position at a McDonald’s in Downtown Brooklyn. The charges were eventually dropped.

“The only option many parents have is to quit the job and get thrown out of their house because they can’t pay the rent, or have your child taken away for lack of supervision,” said Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a nonprofit child advocacy organization. One reason states may not have laws on the subject, Mr. Wexler suggested, is that “it would bring a hidden problem out in the open, which is all of the parents who leave children home alone not because they want to, but because they have to.”

Some experts advise parents to take their cue from the children. “I think children let you know when they’re ready, and I really think a parent needs to listen to that,” said Leslie R. Adelstein, a psychologist in Manhattan. “If they’re not ready, you’re going to induce anxiety.”

Dr. Adelstein said that her 9-year-old daughter felt ready to stay home with her 11-year-old sister starting this spring, and the fact that they live in a doorman building helped. “If your child is home and something happens, they feel that someone is there,” she explained. “In a non-doorman building, it’s different. At that tender age, they have to really develop the confidence in themselves and also feel like they have a grasp on the skills necessary to handle problems.”

Like many parents, Ken Amorello, a lawyer with a 12-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, began small. “We started by letting our son stay home for 15 or 20 minutes when he was almost 10 while my wife picked up some groceries around the corner, and we worked our way up from that,” said Mr. Amorello, a lawyer who lives in a doorman building on the Upper West Side.

The couple just started to leave their son alone with his younger sister recently — for a half-hour at a time. “We saw that he was following the rules,” Mr. Amorello said. “He’s the type of kid who will call up and ask if he can have a third cookie. He has our telephone numbers, and there are neighbors nearby.”

Other parents give their children a push. “I’m so aware of how coddled this generation of children is — they can’t even go out and play by themselves,” said a freelance writer in New Hope, Pa.., who started leaving her children alone two years ago, at ages 9 and 11, but spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. “My husband and I wanted to build some independence, and frankly, I didn’t want to pay for child care.”

But the woman said her younger daughter “had this inexplicable fear of being home alone.”

“Her imagination had gone wild,” she recalled. “We set them up in our bedroom with the TV, the phone and the dog. I had to run to the grocery store for 20 minutes. She had blown it so out of proportion that when I got home, she said, ‘You’re back already?’ ”

Sarah, 12, of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., whose parents asked that she be identified only by her first name for safety reasons, said she is perfectly comfortable being alone, saying that her family lives on a quiet cul-de-sac where the houses are close together. “I just let myself in, and most of the time I go on the computer and play video games,” she said.

But the other day, Sarah and her brother, who is 15, had their first mini-crisis when the new dog had diarrhea in the house.

“We really didn’t know what to do about it, and we couldn’t get in touch with our parents,” she said, adding that they eventually covered the mess with paper towels, shut the door, and left it until the grown-ups got home.

For many parents, summer brings the home-alone question to the fore. Children often have much more free time. And with the difference in camp and school schedules, there might be a smaller gap before the end of the workday — too small to hire a sitter.

Marie Sloan, a bookkeeper in Nassau County, got a new job with longer hours shortly before school let out for her two children, ages 11 and 13. There was no time to arrange camps. So Ms. Sloan’s mother, who lives in Queens, is staying with the family every other week. In the off weeks, the children are on their own.

They are under strict orders to stay in the house, with the doors locked. They cannot have friends over (Ms. Sloan sometimes checks in and brings them food during her lunch hour). They cannot go in the swimming pool in the backyard. And they cannot answer the door.

“I don’t care who’s at the door,” Ms. Sloan said. “If your uncle’s at the door, you don’t open it unless you call me.”

I was a latchkey kid at an early age. I was given specific instructions to call mom the moment I got home. I wasn't to answer the phone nor the front door. I was to only answer the phone after a prescribed amount of rings and waits so that I know it was my mom calling. No swimming, and no friends over. I wasn't allowed to open the door even for aunts or uncles. I wasn't allowed to use the oven or stove, but when we got a microwave that was okay. Very strict about things.

I was also supposed to do things like get cleaned up and change to pajamas. I'd set the table for dinner, and do my homework. Once I was done with that I could watch TV.

What were your afternoons like when you were staying home alone?