The Latchkey Boys: How Gen-X Men Learned to Manage Instead of Explain

He was nine, and the key was on a shoelace under his shirt, because a pocket could fail and a shoelace could not. Between 1973 and 1998, the American one-earner household stopped working and nothing was built to replace what disappeared with it. The shortfall went to the children. Millions of them let themselves into empty houses every afternoon and ran those houses until somebody came home. Nobody planned it. Nobody counted it properly. And nobody has ever explained to the boys who did it what it installed in them. This is that account. The divorce rate peaked when they were seven and nine. Nearly nine in ten American preschoolers carried blood lead above the level that now triggers emergency intervention. Schools recorded a million and a half paddlings in a single year, and boys took four fifths of them. The diagnostic categories that would have found them arrived five to fifteen years too late. And it worked. It produced capable, self-reliant, unflappable men who handle almost anything, and who mostly still do. That is also the problem. Competence was the right answer to 1983. It is a poor answer to a marriage drifting, a body changing, or an isolation that builds one defensible evening at a time — and the failure isn't collapse. It's another twenty years of being fine, and then it's over, and nobody ever knew him. Alone was never the problem. For the men who came home to an empty house — and for anyone who has never quite been able to reach them.
ASIN: B0HCRF2BJ5
VSKU: DBV.B0HCRF2BJ5.A
Condition: Acceptable
Author/Artist:Gilev, Alexander
Binding: Paperback
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: This copy has clearly been enjoyed—expect noticeable shelf wear and some minor creases to the cover. Binding is strong, and all pages are legible. May contain previous library markings or stamps.