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45 Degrees North: Home Alone [1]
['Donna Kallner', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-02-28
One of my favorite jobs as a rural fire department volunteer is helping at a field day for third graders in the Latchkey program at school. The year-long program teaches safety lessons to kids approaching the age where families may begin to leave them home alone.
During the field day, I work a station that teaches about fire extinguishers. We emphasize first getting everyone outside and calling 911. What the kids love best, though, is getting hands-on experience. They learn to make sure there’s a clear exit path and then practice the PASS method (Pull the pin, Aim low, Squeeze the trigger, Sweep the nozzle side to side).
These kids don’t live where a nearby fire station is manned 24/7. Unfortunately, they can’t expect a four-minute response time from fire, EMS, or law enforcement, or from working parents, relatives, or friends who might be called on to help kids who are home alone. In more populated areas, maybe parents can have more faith in safe places and a larger safety net to support their children. Out here, though, the distance to and scarcity of resources can amplify concerns for rural families. So we try to give kids as many tools as we can for managing situations no one wants them to face.
Deciding at what age and under what circumstances kids are old enough to be home alone isn’t easy and there’s no one-age-fits-all answer. The factors influencing that decision include everything from economic circumstances to geographic and environmental concerns, from perceptions of public safety to what will the neighbors think? Only one thing is certain: At some point, most children need to be prepared to manage on their own – maybe just for an hour or two at first but eventually even longer.
For rural parents, the logistics of getting kids ready for that level of responsibility and independence involves some hard choices. Here are some of their concerns, and options to consider when deciding how to manage that parental purgatory where the definition of “adequate supervision” is so hard to pin down.
Ready or not? Physical, mental, social, and emotional maturity develop at different times for different kids. That makes it challenging for parents to find simple answers about when their kid is ready to stay home alone. As with many things, rural families can turn to state land grant university extension offices for guidance. This resource from the University of Wisconsin Extension offers some signs that the time has come. For example, the child indicates a desire and willingness to stay alone, and accepts responsibility for their choices. Another marker is when a child can solve small problems on their own, knows who to ask for help with bigger problems, and demonstrates willingness to do so. For many children, these abilities can appear between the ages 9 and 12.
Beyond age. Other considerations besides age are important in considering when a child might be left home alone. The child should know their own address, the basic geography of where they live, the complete names of parents or guardians and where they work, how to use a phone to make a call, and one or more numbers they can remember without referencing a contacts list. They should be able to tell time and be learning to manage it. They should be able to recognize and understand expectations about their responsibilities – including things like getting ready for school and getting homework and chores completed without total reliance on parental prodding. They should have the physical capability to reach and operate door locks and window latches and the emotional maturity to discuss what makes them uncomfortable. They should have some awareness that their actions affect others, and be learning to distinguish between discomfort and danger.
Regressive behaviors. Many kids who seem very mature under normal circumstances show regressive behaviors under stress. A 10-year-old may act 13-going-on-30 until something goes wrong. Will they rise to challenges like the plucky heroes of children’s literature? Or will they think and behave like a younger child and wait for someone or something else to resolve the situation?
Practice. Hope for the best but plan for the worst, and practice those plans. You may not want to scare your kid by talking about situations they probably won’t face, but it can be even scarier for them to hear rules without reasons, or to learn under stress that a solution you instructed them to use won’t work the way you thought.
So start sooner rather than later giving them practice making thoughtful decisions by discussing scenarios and acting out ways they might handle them. What would you do if the power went out? What if you get a tornado alert? What would you do if the smoke alarm goes off? What if you see or smell smoke outside? What if you get locked out of the house by accident? What if there’s a bear on the deck? What if someone unfamiliar delivers a package and says you have to sign for it? What if someone knocks on the door asking for help? Or to say they hit our dog on the road? What if there’s a strange vehicle parked nearby? What if someone you know stops by and you feel uncomfortable? What if you get sick or hurt when you’re here by yourself? What if you had a really bad day at school and you’re feeling angry, anxious or sad? What if someone calls and says I was in an accident but they don’t know our family code word? What if a cell tower gets hit by lightning and you can’t reach anyone by phone?
Phones. Now that landlines are a thing of the past in many rural households, parents have an added concern: Without a phone, how can a kid check in or call for help? How do you manage screen time and other concerns when unsupervised kids have access to a cell phone? How do you afford more phones for the family? One alternative is to keep a household phone with limited features and strong parental controls always located where your grandparents would have kept the landline. That’s less than ideal, though, when one of the best things about growing up in the country is being able to spend time outdoors. So another option is a kid-friendly smartwatch with voice and text features and built-in GPS location services.
Stranger danger. How do parents balance the very real need to foster independence with the fear that a stranger might commit a crime of opportunity against their child while they are home alone or target their child because of circumstances that might exist in a rural household? Here’s an example: In Wisconsin in 2018, then-13-year-old Jayme Closs was targeted when a stranger saw her getting on the school bus at her family’s home. She was not home alone when he forced his way into the residence, killed her parents and abducted her.
Eventually, she escaped and the perpetrator was captured and sentenced to life in prison without eligibility for parole on the murder charges, plus an additional 40 years for the kidnapping. But how does a parent not have flashbacks to that story when trying to make a plan for their child to be home alone?
Even worse. The sad reality is that perpetrators of abuse and crimes against children are less likely to be a stranger than someone known to the family. So parents pondering the home alone situation will definitely worry about how residency restrictions on where sex offenders can live seem to drive them to rural areas and do their due diligence in frequently checking the state database for registered sex offenders with nearby addresses.
But they may not see the danger from the known relative or friend. A parental abduction that rocked my rural community a few years back still has me grateful that those children did not disappear into the hell of sex trafficking. Some kids just might be better off home alone than with a loving parent determined to follow bad decisions with worse ones. Some kids might be better off home alone than with any number of alternatives that don’t seem to ring alarm bells.
ALICE. Wanting to shield kids from all harm is a natural instinct. But kids don’t develop the skills to become independent overnight, or without some practice. Practice is why schools do fire and tornado drills, and they are effective. You may have heard less about another type of training kids get at school that use preparation and planning to overcome passive paralysis in an active shooter situation: ALICE is an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. It’s a strategic system for response to a specific kind of threat, but the principles can be applied to situations a rural child might face when home alone. All the situations suggested above under Practice could be revisited using the ALICE framework.
Milestones. In urban areas, walking to school “alone” with friends is a milestone (even if kids don’t see the relay of parents watching over them as they learn to move about their world independently). Country kids who attend consolidated schools that serve a geographic area too large for most kids to walk probably ride a school bus or (more likely these days) get dropped off and picked up by a parent or relative. So think of alternatives to help foster a growing sense of independence and the responsibility that comes with it. For example, task your child with giving the driver directions to and from home and other locations. Who lives along the route and what do we know about them? What might we do here if the car broke down or had a flat tire? How would we get home?
Find age-appropriate milestones of growing independence to acknowledge and celebrate early and often. That’s like not just having fire extinguishers in your home but also teaching kids when and how to use them.
Donna Kallner writes from Langlade County in rural northern Wisconsin.
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