As children demonstrate that they are mature enough to handle those short bouts of time alone, most parents increase the frequency and duration of self care about the time that children are entering middle school.

Families usually start using self care by having their children spend short amounts of time unsupervised after school. Most parents gradually transition their children to self care. In general, time spent in self care increases with the age of the child. In determining when children can be unsupervised, parents often consider age, emotional maturity, and competence of the child. Parental discretion is important in determining when and how much self care children experience. Self care is one type of arrangement that fills in part of that time for the many families struggling to maintain supervision of their children during the after school hours. A recent estimate of the time lag between when schools are dismissed and when parents return from work suggests that time can amount to twenty to twenty-five hours per week. city found that approximately 33 percent of the third-grade children, 44 percent of the fourth-grade children, and slightly more than half of the fifth-grade children spent some part of the after school hours in self care. The evidence indicates that self care is used for part of the after-school hours either regularly or on occasion by far more than 12 percent of families with elementary school children. For another, most families depend on a patchwork of arrangements during the week. Although very few states have laws governing self care, many people do not perceive self care as an optimal arrangement.

For one, parents have an interest in underreporting self care. That report is probably an underestimate for several reasons. For example, researchers estimate that, overall, 12 percent of children between the ages of five and twelve years old care for themselves at least one afternoon per week. Those studies have found that a very small percentage of families use self care as the main arrangement for their elementary and middle school age children. Several studies of large nationally representative samples in the United States have measured how many children are in self care by surveying parents about their children's after school care. Adolescents attending high school also have not been included in studies of self care because researchers and the public consider it developmentally appropriate for high school students to care for themselves after school without direct adult supervision. However, one national study that included pre-school children found that 67,000 (less than 1 percent of the preschool population) spent some time in self care. Preschool children usually have not been included in studies measuring self care because it is considered inappropriate for preschool children to be unsupervised for any amount of time. Currently, the term self care is used to refer to elementary and middle school children who are without adult supervision during the after-school hours whether they are at home, at friends' houses, or in public places.

Elementary school self care checklist