What age is reasonable for a child to be home alone after school?

[Fortheloveofpizza]

Another price increase email from after school today. As of next year I will only have one child left needing childcare thankfully.
I have always kept them in until P7 which is 11/12 . My youngest will be 8 next year and I will only need OSc one day for an hour. He’s a short walk home. What age do you think a child can let themselves in and be alone for an hour?
Appreciate not 8 but interested on what ages.

Kids in this country are babied to a ridiculous extent, there’s a thread about young people getting jobs where parents are admitting they are the ones trying to find jobs for their 16+ year old ‘kids’. And then they wonder why the young people enter the working world completely unable to cope

10/11 maybe 9 depending on child. My nephew could probably manage that (just turned 8) but then he had trouble with the key when I looked after him at his house last weekend but he’d been fine with it before. So maybe not. Leave spare keys with neighbours.

Well, that depends, alone because mum is arriving from work, or gone to the corner shop or to a medical appointment or alone because haven´t seen mum since yesterday.

But clearly many of them ARE ready because they manage it perfectly well everyday.

Also, if you live and work in an area where it’s not the norm and doesn’t happen, how do you know that the children wouldn’t actually manage just fine given the opportunity?

Yep - see the current thread from a mother who doesn’t think her 16yo should get a job in a travel agent as she’s too young 🫣

Where I lived in 70s (SE London) by age 8 we could and did go to the corner shop up the hill (3 mins walk away) especially to pick up eg milk for my mum. Preferable if a friend came with me. Nothing ever happened to us. But I appreciate times are different now. By 9-10 I was getting the bus 20-30 mins to the swimming pool with my best friend. Once there was no bus for ages and my stepdad came by in the car by chance and gave us a lift. For that we always had time limits and to come straight back afterwards (after maybe a trip to the sweet shop, no McDonald’s or Costa (that didn’t exIst trips). Taught us independence.

FGS that’s ridiculous. My nana didn’t think I should commute to London when I started work at 17 but I commuted to the nearest big town (Croydon) for office work then. Taught me so much but I learned too. The employers know your age so act accordingly.

You can get married at 16 with permission, leave home and have a baby then too.

I know! Worrying isn’t it? But then it doesn’t surprise me reading threads about uni students with curfews and all sorts 😂

My mum at age 11 onwards was travelling back from Tooting by bus and with a walk from there to Battersea. She then got dinner in a local cafe and went home, she was a latchkey kid, 1951/52. Her mum had her own business with her stepfather so worked all the time. Everyone knew my mum and her parents locally though. She travelled back and to school (Ensham Central) with her best friend who lived in Clapham with her grandmother. The one thing my mum didn’t like (but then recently she forgot about this when we went near there to see a family friend) was walking past Springfield Hospital which was a mental institution near Wandsworth common (long gone now from there I think).

@Naffatthinkingofnicknames if this is true it is bonkers as our local primary allows walking home along from Y4 (when children are 8/9) what an enormous waste of police time (unless you are about to declare a drip feed of compounding factors)

Well that's a different county, which is why I said i am not gonna judge on a theoretical situation.

We do keep our kids "younger" and safeguarded for longer here these days and there are good and bad sides to that.

As I said in a previous post, I allow my 8 yr old to stay home alone for short periods of time, cos I do believe in building independence and resilience, which many here would be horrified about, (as you can probably tell from this thread) and I actually think too many parents are over-protective and stifle growth. (if a parent tells me they have an anxious child, 8/10 times it's the parents that are anxious and the kids are fine once the parents build themselves up to leave them!)
BUT the are a number of horrid teenagers hanging about all over these days (not as many as people make out, I work with lots of wonderful ones, so not dragging an entire age group) but enough that I wouldn't be comfortable letting them wander solo. (as well as the adult stranger danger that is more commonly talked about, again rarer than mad out, but not non-existent)

Some threads are certainly eye-opening! My own 15 year old had her first day at her first summer job today, a job she searched for and applied for all by herself, my only input was a little help with wording an email reply to the contact person (which she completely ignored because she decided she could word things better herself, which is probably true as its not my first language)

Very worrying. And not at all good for people.

It’s absolutely ridiculous how kids are babied these days but with parents wfh or taking parental leave they can look after them more. When I was 8 my mum worked as a teacher about a 20 min drive away. If I was off sick she drove home in her lunch break to give me soup and check I was ok then drove straight back home. Or she’d have lost her job. Later on in years my step-grandma came over to mind us if we were off sick, she couldn’t do when I was 8 as she still worked. My nana (mum’s mum) had her own business up to age 70 so couldn’t mind us either.

The only other thing which happened when I came home from school by myself at 12 was getting locked out but either a neighbour helped or I climbed over the back fence to let myself in. My friend a few doors down as a teenager set fire to the kitchen cooking something but that was rare. It didn’t burn down. My best friend was picked up by older siblings living at home or made her own way home from at least 7 (just round the corner and crossing the road with the lollipop lady). Her mum was a single parent working very hard. At 8/9 not every night but certainly once a week, she’d walk or get the bus a few stops (5-10 mins bus ride) to the nearest small town where her mum worked at Tesco, meet her mum when she was on a break, have dinner from a takeaway shop or in a cafe, then go to the Youth Club that was next to where her mum worked. Her mum or elder siblings would take her home afterwards.