I was a Latchkey Kid: My Real Gen-X Childhood

Forget the generic Gen-X nostalgia take — this is the real one, first person, with receipts.

Ashtrays were a chore. I was babysitting a newborn at twelve for $20 a week. My brother Neil drove a truck at eleven. I was balancing a till at a bingo hall at thirteen in a room so thick with smoke it could cure a ham. And somehow, none of this was considered unusual.

In this episode of Nicole's Notes, I'm walking through my actual feral childhood — the games, the jobs, the unsupervised summers, the playground equipment that could legally reach Mach 10 — and making the case that all of it built something specific in us: self-sufficiency, self-regulation, conflict management, and the ability to get things done without calling a meeting about it first.

We grew up latchkey and feral. We turned out fine. Mostly.

Transcript

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It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your kids are? That used to run on TV during primetime news back in my day. In the nineteen eighties, when we were feral children. And I want you to know, my parents did not know where I was. Nobody's parents knew where anybody was. That wasn't a gap in the system, that was the system. I'm Nicole, and this is Nicole's Notes. Today I'm not going to tell you about Gen X in the abstract. I'm going to tell you about my childhood specifically with receipts, because I went back through some old pictures, and apparently I was documenting an entire crime scene of normal 1980s parenting and didn't even realize it at the time. Let's start small. My first job, I can't remember how old I was, possibly still missing teeth, was emptying ashtrays. Yes, going around the house and emptying ashtrays. That was a chore. Not make your bed, although that was also one of them. But emptying actual ashtrays like a tiny butler in a smoke-filled house. I used to give my mom or dad a cigarette out of their own pack, just handed it right over, and it made me feel so grown up, like I'd been promoted from child to household staff with privileges. That's why I still get those Popeye candy sticks. You can find them different candy stores, but it was the same thing. You just push it, push it through, and then you'd pull out your little stick and put it in your mouth and pretend you were smoking. Uh, I still I still enjoy doing that at almost 54. I cooked lunch for my baby brother, and we'd watch the Flintstones while we ate it, which is either an incredibly sweet image or a liability lawsuit depending entirely on what I was cooking and whether the stove was involved. Probably the stove was involved. I was the chef, the babysitter, and the entertainment director. And I was approximately the size of a kitchen chair. Speaking of being in charge of small humans, by age 12, I was babysitting a family of three, including a newborn, five days a week for $20 a week. 20 bucks a week. That's it. For a human infant. But also, that family looked at a 12-year-old and said, Yeah, she's ready. And apparently I was, because nobody called child services and the baby survived, and so did I. And it wasn't just me and of this responsibility. Me, it was the whole neighborhood operating without adult supervision. We were like an unsupervised economy of our own. We would disappear for the entire summer day until the lights came on. We would go house to house playing games with no agenda, no itinerary. We would walk to food land by ourselves and buy penny candy with whatever change we'd scrape together, conducting actual commerce as children, unsupervised, in a store with cash registers and lots of strangers. We didn't lock our doors. I mean, you just didn't. Why would you do that? That's weird. And we traveled in packs, but also completely alone. And looking back now, as someone who has the audacity to be an adult, it would have been so easy to kidnap any one of us. We trusted everyone. Every adult was a potential authority figure, every porch was a potential snack stop. The world was apparently full of strangers, and somehow none of them were the ones the PSA was worried about. Now, transportation. My brother Neil and I once took a truck, just the two of us, to a small town near our farm called Hatherley. Neil drove. Neil was 11. I'd like you to picture an 11-year-old behind the wheel of a truck, navigating an actual road, with me in the passenger seat providing what I can only assume is extremely confident, completely unqualified backseat driving. Two years later, I personally backed my mom's car out at a shopping mall at 14 and hit the car beside me, which, in my defense, was also just parked there minding its own business, completely unprepared for what was coming. By 13, I had a job, not a paper roof, a bingo hall, in the full smoke, $2.50 an hour, and I was in charge of cashing out the till and doing the deposits. Thirteen years old doing cash reconciliation in a room thick enough to season a brisket. I peaked financially at 13 and I'm not sure I've recovered. And then winter, oh my god, winter. Winter meant the curling rink, where we'd follow our parents and just get set loose while they were out on the ice smoking, throwing rocks, with Ashtray sitting right there in the middle of it, all like part of the equipment. We ran wild through that building while actual athletic competition happened 20 feet away in a literal cloud. Oh, the playgrounds, they deserve their own documentary. We had rides that I am fairly certain could reach Mach 10 if enough big kids got behind them. And you'd watch these smaller kids just go flying off in every direction. Look like a human catapult demonstration. And we played on scorching hot slies in the summer that literally branded us. And underneath all of it was concrete. Just concrete. No mats, no foam, no committee that met to discuss impact safety. If you fell, the ground lets you know about it personally. We had lawn darts, the actual metal spike kind, the ones that eventually got banned because we had at least one or two incidents where someone got hit directly in the head with a lawn dart, and the response was not, let's ban this game. It was watch where you're standing next time. And the games we built ourselves were somehow more dangerous than the equipment. We'd throw a ball from the street, clean over a house to kids waiting in the backyard with absolutely no idea where it was coming from or when. And you just have to catch it on instinct and reflex. And then we'd switch sides and do it all over again. Kick the can would send all of us scattering across the entire street the second the sun started going down. You were hiding in shadows while the kicker counted to 100. And the real skill wasn't hiding. It was sneaking back to kick the can again without getting caught, which is frankly advanced tactical thinking for an eight-year-old. School wasn't spared either. We had class in portables, so cold we wore our jackets and our mitts indoors, just sitting there doing math in full winter gear like it was completely normal. Which it was, because nobody questioned it. We walked to school regardless of distance, unless you were a farm kid who had a legitimate past. And once we were home, our entire connection to the outside world was a phone bolted to a wall. When it rang, you had no idea who was calling. None. You just picked it up and found out live, on the spot, no caller ID, no warning. And being allowed to answer that phone at a young age was treated like an actual honor, like a promotion, like being handed a small piece of the household's trust. I remember answering it, Zella Residence, this is Nikki. So here's the inventory if you're keeping score. I was a cook, a babysitter, a till operator, a smoke break enabler, and an unlicensed 13-year-old bookkeeper, all before I could legally see a PG-13 movie without an adult. Nobody trained me for any of it. There was no manual for what to do when the ball comes over the house and you don't know which direction. There was no orientation for how to recount, kick the cam positions without starting a riot. I just learned it the way you learn anything when nobody's coming to bail you out. Fast and usually with a minor injury attached. And that's the part I actually want to land on. All of that, the lunch making, the till balancing, the truck driving, 11-year-olds, the lawn dart incidents built something specific in me. Self-sufficiency, because someone had to be the adult in the room. And most days that someone was me at age 12, holding a spatula. Self-regulation, because there was no one narrating my feelings back to me. I had to figure out my own boredom, my own hunger, my own emotional thermostat alone, in a portable classroom wearing mittens. Conflict management because kit the can does not come with a referee, and neither does share in a kitchen with your baby brother, and neither does an 11-year-old's driving instructions. And the ability to burn off excess energy properly. Because Mach 10 playground equipment and scorching concrete will absolutely use up every ounce of a child's energy by dinner time, which, as it happens, I was usually the one cooking. And I'm not telling you any of this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you this because I turned 13 years of being trusted with cash registers and infants and pickup trucks into being a 50-plus adult who does not need a meeting to process a minor inconvenience. None of us do. We were doing cash deposits before we could legally babysit in some provinces. And we are not about to ask permission to run our own lives now. Okay, I have to say something here though, because every time I talk about our neglect and drinking water from the hose, my mom gets so mad. She's like, Nicole, stop saying that. You weren't neglected. And and she's she's not wrong. We weren't neglected. It was just that at that time both parents had to work, and this is this is how you survived. So, mom, please do not take offense on this podcast. You guys were awesome parents, and I love you both. And we all survived. We all grew up together. So just don't be mad at me for this podcast. So tell me yours. Tell me about the chore that made you feel grown up, the ride that launched you across a playground, the year you learned to drive in a vehicle you weren't legally allowed to touch. Find me at Cokeontherocks.ca. Thank you for listening to me, Rant. I'm Nicole Zeller. Stay fierce, the world will adjust.