There's a three-hour-or-so slice of late afternoon that puzzles me: the hours after school lets out and before the family gathers for dinner.

What are kids supposed to do during this time, anyway?

As a society, we don't seem to know. It's not like the hours from 8 to 3, when the drill is known to all: Parents go to work, kids go to school. It's not like the hours after 6 when a sort of consensus reigns again: Parents anchor the home and the kids do whatever the parents deem appropriate, with a babysitter thrown into the mix from time to time.

But after school? Maybe we haven't caught up to who we are. Schools let out around 3. Businesses let out around 5. It can take parents up to an hour or more to get home. Love it or hate it, that's the way it is. We have a gap between the lives of kids and parents, and no common system for bridging it. It's as if the gap were some unanticipated problem to which each family is responsible for improvising its own solution, much the same as when someone comes down with the flu.

What results is a free-for-all, with every family prowling for options or circling available programs like a desperate game of musical chairs.

Home alone
We call them latchkey kids. The term derives from the image of young children carrying house keys on strings around their necks or in their pockets. When school ends, they make their way home alone and let themselves into an empty house. What they do after that is between them and the cat.

I don't know how many latchkey kids there are in America today. The Orange County Police Department says 15 million. The U.S. Census Bureau pegged it recently at 6.9 million. A University of Michigan study estimated 3.4 million in 1990.

I'll go with "lots."

Bad stuff happens
The Christian Science Monitor says juvenile crime peaks during the after-school hours. And according to a report from the National Safe Kids Campaign, 4.5 million children are injured in their homes every year, most of them kids who are unsupervised after school.

Personally, I don't need numbers. I picture a child between the ages of 6 and 12 coming home alone, and instantly my mind fills with catastrophic images. This can't be any parent's preferred choice. There must be a better solution.

But whose problem is it, anyway?