Children’s perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.
My household is absorbed in debate over when time goes the fastest or slowest.
Slowest in the car!” yells my son.
“Never!” replies my daughter. “I’m too busy for time to go slow, but maybe on weekends when we are on the sofa watching movies.”
There’s some consensus too; they both agree that the days after Christmas and their birthdays dawdle by gloomily as it dawns on them they have to wait another 365 days to celebrate once more. Years seem to drag on endlessly at their age.
Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology who studies cognitive development at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, believes children and time is a hugely understudied topic.
Her work has long probed whether there is something fundamentally different about time processes in children, such as an internal clock that functions at a different speed to that of adults. But there are still more questions than answers.
“It’s strange that we don’t still really know the answers to questions like when do children have a proper distinction between the past and the future, given that this seems to structure the entire way that we think about our lives as adults,” says McCormack. She explains that whilst we don’t have a clear understanding of when children grasp a sense of linear time
We do know that from relatively early on in development, children seem to be Sensitive to routine events such as meal times and bed times. She stresses this is not the same as having an adult sense of linear time.
