Home And On Your Own

With an estimated 14 million children fitting the description of "latchkey kids," or children who spend some part of their day home alone, a good program on the subject would be more than welcome. Unfortunately, even under optimum conditions an 18-minute tape would have to be jam-packed with information in order to be truly useful. Dilute that 18-minutes with a few meandering and overlong skits as Home and On Your Own does, and you end up with a program that mentions areas of concerns without really exploring any of them. Ostensibly, the program covers safety, phone handling, cooking, emergencies, peer pressure, care of younger siblings, and "coping with unsupervised situations"--a vague catch-all which sounds like the job description for being a latchkey kid, rather than a particular aspect of being home alone. But besides showing viewers brief skits, the program doesn't actually advise parents or kids--beyond the extremely general--on what to do. Developed by the Boston University Center on Work and Family, Home and On Your Own is about ten years late. We don't need an introduction to a subject that has been an issue for quite some time now. People need suggestions and working models, not definitions. Not a necessary purchase. (Available from: Lifespan Communications, P.O. Box 183, Newton, MA 02165; (800) 524-1013.)