Constructing the Past and the Future: How Children Understand Time by William Friedman
		1 | 2 | 3 In my studies with children, I have discovered that even four- to five-year-olds have an intuitive sense of the distances of remembered events in the past. These impressions of the ages of memories allow young children to make gross discriminations, such as distinguishing the ages of a school activity that happened one week ago from that of another event that occurred seven weeks ago, or a birthday that was one month ago from a holiday that happened nine months earlier. But young children cannot reconstruct the months, seasons, or years when remembered events occurred. The ability to reconstruct the month or season of a remembered event improves substantially between five and eight years of age. It is striking, though, that most children cannot use this information to determine which of two events was a longer time ago until about age 10. It is one thing to know the months of your birthday and Christmas and another to be able to think about the backward order of months to determine which events was a longer time ago. This developmental pattern suggests that basic memory processes, present by early childhood, permit an intuitive sense of the ages of remembered events. However, it takes many years for children to learn about conventional time patterns, such as seasons and months, and to be able to use their mental representations of these time patterns in flexible ways. The Development of a Sense of the Future Mental representations of time patterns allow adults to think about the times of events What is young children's sense of the past and future like before they have learned conventional representations of time, such as the calendar? that are expected to happen later the same day, week, month or season, and even decades in the future. Representations of time patterns must also play a crucial role in children’s ability to grasp the times of future events, so one might expect a differentiated sense of the future to develop during the elementary-school years. But are there more basic ways of distinguishing distances in the future, as there are early ways of distinguishing the times of past events, ones that are available to young children? Clearly, they could not be memory based, as is the case with memory for the times of events--we can’t have memories of the future. A number of my studies show that young children do have ways of distinguishing distances of events in the future that do not depend on knowledge of the calendar. Five-year-olds tested in early February know that Valentine’s Day is coming soon (and even that summer is coming relatively soon), whereas Halloween and Christmas are in the more distant future. Although there is no definitive evidence, it seems very likely that this knowledge is rooted in memory of parents’ and teachers’ statements about approaching events. In the weeks before Valentine’s Day, children hear repeated mention of the imminence of this holiday, but memories for adults’ statements about the approach of Halloween must be very weak. At least through seven years of age, children report the future distances of holidays in categorical terms (for example, "soon" or "not for a long time"), probably because they depend on their memory for adults’ statements about the nearness of events. By about 10 years of age, children report the future distances of holidays as numbers of months, showing that they, like adults, are using mental representations of time patterns. Differentiating the Past and the Future Basic processes allow young children to differentiate to some extent times within the past and within the future, and representations that develop during the elementary-school years greatly enrich these dimensions. What about the distinction between the past and the future? The distinction is so clear for adults that one might expect it to be a sharp one for young children as well. But many of my studies of children’s sense of the past and of the future show confusion between the two. When children less than six years of age are asked to judge whether their birthday or Christmas was more recent, those whose birthdays are due to occur within the next month often respond incorrectly that their birthday was a shorter time ago. Similarly, when young children evaluate distances in the future, they often judge recent events to be coming very soon. Young children even err when asked directly whether Valentine’s Day is in the past or the future just after the holiday. And the problems are not restricted to cyclical events, for which both answers are strictly correct. Four-year-olds also have difficulty distinguishing the past-future status of unusual life events that their parents have discussed with them. <...more> 1 | 2 | 3
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