Word: latchkeys
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...released last spring, was already about a family back when it was a crummy TV show. As a crummy movie, it turns itself into a cautionary tale about bad parenting, complete with an It's a Wonderful Life-like parallel universe in which we see what becomes of latchkey kids on other planets (nothing good...
...from stress and violence often try to escape to places very much like Jonesboro. But most of the recent school shootings have occurred in rural areas. The psychic stresses of the 1990s are not so easy to evade--not when so many of them, from TV to being a latchkey child, are right in the home. There they can easily act on any kid who believes that "the world has wronged me"--a sentiment spoken from the darkest part of the human heart. And no place in America is more than a stone's throw from there...
Peggy Charren, the leading crusader for the Children's Television Act and a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, says, "There is no one set of guidelines applicable to every family. It's hard to tell working parents with latchkey kids, for instance, to keep them away from the television. But parents should at least get involved in what the children watch. Some of it is wonderful, some of it mindless, some of it horrifying, and they need our guidance...
...Beavis and Butt-head were their icons; Beck's Loser was their song ("Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park"); Richard Linklater's Slacker, with its Austin, Texas, deadbeats, was their movie. This was the MTV generation: Net surfing, nihilistic nipple piercers whining about McJobs; latchkey legacies, fearful of commitment. Passive and powerless, they were content, it seemed, to party on in a Wayne's Netherworld, one with more antiheroes--Kurt Cobain, Dennis Rodman, the Menendez brothers--than role models. The label that stuck was from Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel, Generation X, a tale...
...recession of 1990-91. Gen X could never presume success. In their new book Rocking the Ages, Yankelovich's Smith and his colleague Ann Clurman blame Xers' woes on their parents: "Forget what the idealistic boomers intended, Xers say, and look instead at what they actually did: divorce. Latchkey kids. Homelessness. Soaring national debt. Bankrupt Social Security. Holes in the ozone layer. Crack. Downsizing and layoffs. Urban deterioration. Gangs. Junk bonds...