A child’s perception of the passing of time is much different than an adults. Parents might have forgotten that.
♦◊♦
Close your eyes, relax. Let me take you back to your childhood. It’s the middle of summer. You get up around ten or eleven, grab a bowl of Lucky Charms, barely taking breaths in between spoonfuls. Milk still dribbles down your chin as the bowl hits the sink. As you are shoving your shoes on your feet, you can hear your mother yell “be back by dark” as the door slams behind you. You run out to join your friends in the street, in the woods or whatever. Every summer day is the longest, the days seemed to last forever. Time is everlasting and every second lasts an eternity. This is a child’s perception of time.
Children, acutely aware of the world around them perceive time as a dragging affair, ever second is played out in real time as their brains are soaking up information left and right. While the brains of our children are developing they are constantly collecting information from the world around them, accumulating knowledge about the world from basic things such as sunrise and sunset, to the way the blades of grass move in a slight breeze on a particular hill in their neighborhood. Every click on that internal clock is loud and highly perceived. The important thing is that the passing of time is no different for a child than it is for an adult, in the relativity of it all. It’s the perception that changes.
Fast forward to adulthood. We are now in control of our environments (most of us at least) and our brains are soaking up less information as we move through the day. We don’t care about the simple things anymore, everything from driving a car to walking through a dark house at night becomes reflex. The relevance of our environments hold less sway over our world. Time appears to speed up. We access our memories to try to combat the passing of time, but this daydreaming only further enhances the perception of time. This is when we look at photos of our children as babies with melancholy, saying to ourselves “where did the time go?”
“Children are experiencing everything for the first time, all their experiences are new. They also have an amazingly intense vision of the world, an amazing fresh perception. Children are incredibly awake to the world around us, so time passes slowly for them.” Says Steve Taylor, author of the book Making Time. He goes on about the perception of time in adulthood in this article from the BBC, “There is less novelty in our life and you become used to the world and more familiar. You take in less information from the world around us and time is less stretched with information.”
♦◊♦
Often we get frustrated by a common complaint from our children. It’s two simple words that grind at our very souls and almost seem like an insult to the clock itself. Those words? “I’m bored.” They are uttered when boredom should not be an issue, when we are busy ourselves or there is little time to be bored in. Moments before bedtime the other night, my tween came to my while I was writing. I turned to him and waited, he seemed to be collecting the two word thought before “I’m bored” came out of his mouth. Bedtime was literally less than ten minutes away. To me, a flicker of time in the night. To him, a veritable eternity.
So while a child perceives the passing of time as an affair to fit in more shenanigans, we perceive the passing of time as, well, we almost don’t. Except on those really slow days at work. The thing is, we often forget that we were once children and had a similar perception of time. We can’t expect children to understand how time affects us now, but we can prepare them for the future by being patient with their expectations of time. It’s not going to be possible to entirely bridge the gap, but teaching them that patience can help. I’m not saying take them to the DMV every weekend to queue in line, I’m saying explain to them that part of life is noticing and dealing with the passing of time in a moderately mature manner. Of course, all those whiners on Monday at work don’t seem to do that.
Where children need constant stimulation to fill ever waking moment of their time, adults feel they need extra moments to simply do nothing. Where children find the passing of time an inconvenient event falling between the last and the next activity, adults see it as a chance to take a breath, or get some dishes cleaned before the ants move in. Children don’t understand how we can stand to do nothing for those moments, we don’t understand how they cannot just sit patiently and wait. They can’t sit patiently and wait! Are you out of your freaking mind?
♦◊♦
There is a They Might be Giants song titled “Older.” Here are the lyrics:
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re older still.
TIME! Is marching on.
And time.. is still marching on.
This day will soon be at an end and now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
This day will soon be at an end and now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s sooner still.
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re older still.
There is an un-official theory called the proportional theory, which states that as we get older, a year is a smaller ratio of our life as a whole so our perception of it changes – it seems to speed by quicker. When you are born, you have 100% of your life to live in front of you, as you age that percentage starts to dwindle and you take in less and less new information. So children have so much of their lives in front of them, while (sigh) us old folks have less and less. So what can we do about it?
Well, we can start by enjoying the moments we have with our children and perceiving time with them, especially when they are young. Learning to read, doing projects or just playing mindlessly in the yard. As they are soaking up new information, time for us will seem to slow as well. Our interaction with their interaction with the world will help bridge the gap in time perception.
Another tip for enjoying the time that children perceive as forever is by taking some time for yourself to enjoy new things yourself – if you can involve your children, then more power to you. Every time you experience something for the first time, time seems to slow down. Your perception of time changes during the learning experience, which takes you right back to being a child. And isn’t that what life is all about anyway? We’re constantly getting older, so why not take some time to experience life as if we are children again? Because perception is reality, and reality is time. It’s time to spend some time.
♦◊♦
As I often do, I polled my Twitter followers to see how they feel about the passing of time. Of course, I was doing so during NFL games, so the responses might be a little… off. How do you recognize the perception of time between children and adults? How do you spend time to bridge the gap in perception?
“I perceive time as something I’m desperately trying to slow down, as a child, I wanted it to speed up…” – @daily_pinch
“For adults time is a luxury: ‘I finally get some *me* time.’ For kids it’s a hindrance: ‘I have to wait *how* long?!'” – @hipsterplease
“My mom said each year=a fraction. When you are 5, that year is 1/5, so seems long. At 32, that year is 1/32, so seems faster.” – @midgetinvasion
“Kids think everything takes “forever” because an hour is a much higher percentage of their lives than it is for adults.” – @cutestkidever
“We are counting down to Christmas and he wakes up thinking it is already Christmas. But it’s a great way to learn counting and the days of the week. Also a great lesson in patience for the both of us.” – @mandyj44
“You want time to slow down? Have terrorists shoot the fuck out of your house. Five minutes feels like a billion goddamn years. You want time to go fast? Have a Nuclear bomb in front of you. I swear, those timers are ringed to move faster or something.” – @jackbauertime
“Time? What’s that? Is it like sleep, 1 of those things I never seem to have enough of since my son was born? LOL. He’s worth it.” – @njdevilnyguy
“I’m pretty sure my 2-year-old nephew, sees time as CHOOCHOO CAR LUNCH NAP CAR CAILLOU THOMAS!” – @menolly07
Image Credit: Flickr User alancleaver_2000