A Child's Evolution of Time

It's a well-known fact that children have no concept of time. Ask any parent what the most frequently asked question on a car trip is and they will always answer, "Are we there yet?" It doesn't matter what country you live in or what mode of transportation you use, a child on a camel will still ask, "How much longer?"

Understanding how long an hour is or the sequence of days usually doesn't click for a child until they are in early elementary school. Until that point, they rely on the sun to tell them things like what time to wake up and when to go to bed. Living with kids gives me an inkling of how the cavemen lived. After the fall Daylight Savings, my younger children will continue to wake up because of the sun which means that they get up an hour earlier. In the spring, I have a bit of a respite as we regress to waking up in the dark for a while before the sun catches up. But really, without an agricultural way of life, this time complication only serves to push my little alarm clocks to rouse me earlier and earlier with each waxing day.

Time is a concept that my 6 year old is having a lot of trouble understanding. Starting at about 10 am, she will continue to repeatedly ask me if her best friend has come home from school yet. She knows that the bus drops her off at the same time each day, but still she persists in asking, "Is she home yet? Is she home now?" I've tried to use this as an opportunity to teach time on a clock. I tell her that when the short hand passes the 4 and the long hand sits on the 6 then her friend will be home. When I give her that answer, she'll just keep asking me if the short hand and long hand are at the right positions yet. Thank goodness I don't have to only rely on analog clocks for such a situation. I've posted her best friend's bus arrival next to the oven clock, and each time tell her to go compare the numbers.

In order to cope with my children's inability to tell time, I learned early on to avoid certains topics of conversation with them. Instead of getting off the phone to tell a 3 year old that we were going over to a friend's house the next day, I would withhold the news until we were driving over to the playdate. If I didn't hold back such information, then I would answer an endless series of questions.

"Guess what? We have a playdate tomorrow!" I would say naively.

"Hooray! Where are my shoes?"

"Why?"

"I want to go to the playdate!"

"But we aren't going until tomorrow."

"Oh, ok." A thoughtful pause. "What is tomorrow?"

"Ummmm....it's the day after today?"

"When is that?"

"Well, we still need to eat dinner, you need to sleep all night, then we'll eat breakfast, and after that we'll drive over to your friend's house."

"Can I eat breakfast now and then go over there?"

In an attempt to change the subject, I offered to take the tyke to the playground at that moment or read a book. But sure enough, the questions would start all over again whenever there wasn't some fun distraction.

"Is it time for breakfast yet? Are we going to the playdate now?"

The inability to rationalize with a toddler exhausted my vocabulary. Following a series of questions that asked why and how, I eventually was stumped and couldn't even make up an answer. I mean, how do you explain the answer, "I don't know" to someone who doesn't know what any of those words mean?

Unable to reason with my children, I adopted a different tactic. Life became more peaceful for me if I just waited to break the good news until we were are on their friend's street. Though withholding information led to a different type of conversation. The surprised and elated children then turned on me. They want to know why I hadn't told them about this playdate? Were there other things that I was keeping from them? And why did they always seem to be the last ones to find anything out?

It wasn't until the older toddlers grew up to be teenagers that I had a glimmer of redemption with them. One day my son told me that he finally understood why he and his sister always felt like the last to know anything. As children, they didn't like it when their friends already knew about plans before they did, but now he understands why I never gave them an itinerary since he has experienced life with his 4 year old brother.

Given the choice of answering never ending questions or being thought of as a parent who keeps her kids in the dark, I'll live with the later. Even though this seems mean, eventually the younger kids will understand what the older kids learned from dealing with their siblings. Omission isn't so bad when it prevents insanity. This is a win win situation. Why should I rush my mental problems or the end of my children's time-ignorant bliss? In good time, the youngins will emerge from their Neanderthal ignorance of time into our modern enslavement of it.