According to the report, nearly half of all children ages 12 to 14 spent seven hours home alone, and one of every 10 elementary-school children, some as young as five years old, spends 4-1/2 hours a week unsupervised by an adult.

Experts say the numbers are cause for concern, especially since the afternoon hours are the peak time for juvenile crime. "We've given attention to child care and early childhood, but kids don't magically disappear when they turn 3 or 5 or 12," said Nancy Rankin of the National Parenting Association in New York. "In many ways, children's needs grow more complicated as adolescents."

Of special concern was the report's finding that two percent of the nation's five-year-olds spent an average of 4-1/2 hours a week unsupervised by an adult. "We feel concerned about the younger children," said Kathryn Tout, research associate with Child Trends, a nonprofit research group in Washington. "It's a missed opportunity for them to be in a setting that's more developmentally appropriate. But also it could be potentially dangerous."

Tout said parents are leaving their children unsupervised for several reasons. The biggest factor is that parents have less time to spend with their children because more of them are employed and work longer hours than they did a generation ago.

Kristin Smith, author of the report, said grade-school children with working parents are more than twice as likely to spend part of the day caring for themselves than those whose parents don't work.

Another factor for leaving children alone is the rising cost of child care. In 1995, parents paid an average $85 a week for daycare, nearly 50 percent more than they spent a decade earlier, even after adjusting for inflation.

Smith said high childcare costs appear to be the major reason why many families choose to leave five- to eight-year-olds to care for themselves a few hours a week.

"It used to be that society was organized so that women would be at home to take care of these needs," said Donna Lenhoff, general counsel for the National Partnership for Women and Families in Washington. "Our society is no longer organized like that. But we haven't restructured the workplace."

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