Teaching Young Children About Time

Families Feature Teaching young children about time by Tanith Carey

If you’re the parent of a young child, you’re likely to be hearing the words ‘When’s Santa coming?’ more times than you can count in the weeks running up to Christmas. And when your little ones are never satisfied with your answer, no matter how many times you repeat it, it’s easy to feel a little frustrated.

So, at moments like these, it may help to consider how time looks from your child’s point of view, at each stage of their development.

For example, a toddler only really understands what they can touch or feel. Their first understanding of the concept of time is based on knowing that things – like getting up and having breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath time and story time, happen at roughly the same time every day.

For now, they live in the moment. They can’t touch minutes or hours. So, when you say an event they are looking forward to will happen in ‘ten minutes,’ this is still too abstract a concept for them to fully understand. All they know is that there are some experiences which make them feel happy.

But because they want a visit from grandma or a trip to the zoo NOW, that’s when they think it should happen, which is why they keep on asking.

It will take a few years of life experience and more brain wiring, along with some thoughtful guidance from adults, for youngsters to appreciate an event doesn’t happen instantly because they want it to.

By around the age of 4 or 5, children are starting to grasp that time passes in a predictable way, in the same units of seconds, minutes and hours, for everyone. Kids of this age also have enough experience of the world to relate activities to different times of year. So, they may understand that Christmas happens when it’s cold in Winter, while Halloween takes place when the leaves fall off the trees in Autumn.

Gradually, as their memories improve, they can refer to events that have occurred as happening ‘last week’ or ‘next week,’ even though they still may not get these descriptions quite right. A child of this age who says ‘yesterday’ may be talking about an event that happened last week or even a month ago. Even so, children of this age can start to look forward to events, like birthdays, several months in advance.

At around age 6, children can start to understand how time is represented on a clock face. This is partly since children’s frontal lobes are now more efficiently wired up to the rest of their brains, so they are able to view the world in a more logical way. This allows them a better grasp of what numbers can symbolise, while their working memory now allows them to hold numerical ideas in their heads.

This higher order thinking also allows them to plan more for the future and remember more, so they are now better able to understand the broader concepts of the past, present and future, though you will still get plenty of questions like: ‘Are we there yet?’ if they are on the way to somewhere exciting.

As they grow, taking a little time to explain the sequences of events and adding in lots of time words like ‘seconds,’ ‘minutes’ and ‘hours’ and applying them accurately, will not only help your child make sense of their world but it will also help it feel safer and more predictable.

For more insights into how the world looks at every stage for your child, read ‘What’s My Child Thinking? Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents’ by Tanith Carey and clinical psychologist Dr Angharad Rudkin, published by DK and available from www.bookshop.org

HELPING CHILDREN WITH TIME

AVOID OVEREXCITEMENT. Don’t tell toddlers and pre-schoolers about events too far in advance. Save the news of upcoming events until a few days or hours before. EXPLAIN SEQUENCES. Nursery age children are ready to understand concepts like ‘before’ and ‘after,’ so include these words in your day. SHOW HOW TIME PASSES. Use visual tools like a big calendar to help your toddler and preschooler. Show them how to move a sticker or magnet along each day as it passes and a special day gets nearer.

Once your child reaches age 4 or 5…

LISTEN TO MEMORIES: Pay attention when your child talks about the past. Ask what they were feeling at the time to help them put that memory in context. NOTICE THE WEATHER: Watching the weather can help children understand the concept of ‘yesterday’ or ‘today’ better. Make a chart and mark weather observations. WHAT TIME IS IT: Point out where the hands are on a clock when their favourite things in the day happen, so they start to notice how time passes!