Elder millennial here. We were latchkey kids. Stayed home alone from age 6. Parents were working and we would call their jobs relentlessly. The rules were simple: don’t open the door for anyone, don’t turn on the stove, be home before dark.
Girls will survive abuse, heartbreak, grief, and unspeakable tragedies and still navigate through the world with kindness and compassion, but one minor inconvenience in a man's childhood and he spends the rest of his life terrorizing and poisoning everyone around him
I do not know how to explain this, but as a cat parent, you quickly learn that “absence of cat (chill)” and “absence of cat (suspicious)” are two very different kinds of silence.