At what age do kids usually learn about time?
May 7, 2008 11:59 PM Subscribe
At what age do kids usually learn about time?
Not only how to tell time, but at what age are they usually able to make the leap from a few minutes ago to a few years from now?
Not only how to tell time, but at what age are they usually able to make the leap from a few minutes ago to a few years from now?
I'd say it's a pretty tough concept for kids that they struggle to grasp fully for years. My kids learned to tell time between kindergarten and first grade, but even my fourth grader has a hard time conceptualizing the length of a month or a year or a decade. They can memorize that 30 days are in a month and 365 in a year, but the reality of it isn't there for them.
Not to get to softbrained here, but I think time is a big mystery even for us adults. My grandmother used to say the months went by for her like days do for me. I expect I won't really understand what she meant until I'm in my sixties too.
posted by BinGregory at 12:21 AM on May 8, 2008
Not to get to softbrained here, but I think time is a big mystery even for us adults. My grandmother used to say the months went by for her like days do for me. I expect I won't really understand what she meant until I'm in my sixties too.
posted by BinGregory at 12:21 AM on May 8, 2008
Can't find it now, but there was an FPP not too long ago (last year, sometime?) which involved kids being shown to be fundamentally unable to judge current v future payoffs - eg "do you want a cookie now, or ten cookies in an hour?" and they always went for the one cookie now. Apparently, this was related back to neurological development.
That sounds related to your question, depending on what you mean by "judging time".
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:35 AM on May 8, 2008
That sounds related to your question, depending on what you mean by "judging time".
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:35 AM on May 8, 2008
I learned to read a watch at 100% accuracy at 6 , I think. It was definitely after I learned to read words.
posted by Sparx at 3:18 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by Sparx at 3:18 AM on May 8, 2008
I think I first became aware of time as a medium - the value of seconds and minutes, the measurement of waiting - by sitting through the countdown clocks that used to precede daytime TV programmes in 1970s Britain. These were used mostly for schools programmes, I think, but I definitely first saw them before I started going to school - so aged four at the latest.
By the age of seven or eight I remember having thoughts along the lines of, "In 50 years I will be old, and 50 years is the period since the summer holidays multiplied by 200, and I have had about 10 really good days since the summer holidays, so I can expect about 2,000 more, which... doesn't seem enough."
posted by cincinnatus c at 4:06 AM on May 8, 2008
By the age of seven or eight I remember having thoughts along the lines of, "In 50 years I will be old, and 50 years is the period since the summer holidays multiplied by 200, and I have had about 10 really good days since the summer holidays, so I can expect about 2,000 more, which... doesn't seem enough."
posted by cincinnatus c at 4:06 AM on May 8, 2008
Anecdotally, my 2 1/2 year old daughter has figured out about past (x happened "last night" = x happened sometime in the past), but I'm not sure about future.
posted by leahwrenn at 4:47 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by leahwrenn at 4:47 AM on May 8, 2008
Agreeing with above, they usually start with the concept of time in kindergarten (age 5-6) but how much a kid "gets it" can vary by years.
My daughter caught on to the concept fairly quickly, could read digital clocks and calculate how many minutes until something, etc. She's almost seven now and has a good concept of minutes, hours, days, years.
Oddly enough for a long time we jokingly noted that she was "time dyslexic" because she would say "before" to refer to the future and "after/later" to refer to the past (she knew what order things happened in, but sometimes crossed the words). Either one of those usual kid phases, or she is secretly time traveling without permission.
posted by mikepop at 5:27 AM on May 8, 2008
My daughter caught on to the concept fairly quickly, could read digital clocks and calculate how many minutes until something, etc. She's almost seven now and has a good concept of minutes, hours, days, years.
Oddly enough for a long time we jokingly noted that she was "time dyslexic" because she would say "before" to refer to the future and "after/later" to refer to the past (she knew what order things happened in, but sometimes crossed the words). Either one of those usual kid phases, or she is secretly time traveling without permission.
posted by mikepop at 5:27 AM on May 8, 2008
I'm pretty sure I had "before" and "after" worked out as concepts before I started school. I remember being taught the ideas of minutes and hours, and to read a clock in grade one. About a year later, I asked my dad how dimensions worked, since I'd found out about then that time was considered the fourth dimension. To his eternal credit, he didn't pull a Calvin's Dad answer on me.
posted by LN at 5:43 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by LN at 5:43 AM on May 8, 2008
Here's an article with lots of detail for you. (First result in Google search.)
posted by Jaltcoh at 6:03 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by Jaltcoh at 6:03 AM on May 8, 2008
Was first grade for me. I remember, because I couldn't understand why we had to say "O'clock", and not just the number.
posted by kisch mokusch at 6:22 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by kisch mokusch at 6:22 AM on May 8, 2008
There was a lot of discussion about children's understanding of time in this Santa thread, for some reason. My (somewhat snarky, things must've been heated) comment there talks about cognitive development.
In short, time is like reading and mathematical understanding - it's not the kind of development that consists of a flipped switch - one day you don't get time, the next day you do. It's a stepped progression of gradual understanding. For instance, really young kids can predict routine - it's naptime, the following things are going to happen; it's bath time, the following things are going to happen. At preschool age they've got morning, afternoon, evening, and so on, but God help them understand how long it is until their birthday. By kindergarten, most kids can understand a little bit about clock time - that when the clock says "2:00" it's recess time. Some start to wear a watch and tell time around this age, especially if parents work on it with them, but it's by no means widespread. And despite being able to tell you what the watch says, the conception of length of time or relative time scales is pretty much zilch. Young kids live in a "forever present" where everything is as it is right now. Death is a wicked hard thing at this age, because the dead person/animal must be somewhere since everything always exists. Most kindergarten and some preschool curricula spend a lot of time on calendar awareness -- what month is your birthday, what are the seasons and what weather goes with them, what day of the week is today, that sort of thing. There's explicit teaching of the social construction of calendar and clock time. This generally continues in school curricula with some degree of emphasis until 3rd grade (age 8) or so. This is why there's little teaching of history, as a subject, until 3rd grade - instead, kids study 'social studies' topics like their own towns and community life, neighborhoods, mapping, etc. They certainly read stories and understand that we talk about other times, but the degree to which they 'get' it is pretty low.
By age 8, most kids are down with clock and calendar time, but are still working on historical time and relative time scales. At this age, you see lots of timelines in curricula, so kids can get an idea how many of their lifetimes ago something happened, and grasp that things happen in a chronological order. Most kids at this age can tell time, though visually, analog clocks often take some work. Clocks are essntially graphs, so when kids get graphs, they can get analog clocks. There is a gradual mastery of time within a person's life - today, a week, a month, years. History, as in things that happened before your lifetime, starts to be part of school learning in 4th and 5th grade - but even then, is problematic. I used to teach in a museum where we had historic roleplayers come and talk to the kids in character - they were portraying the year 1876. Quite often, after the program, 5th and even 6th graders would come up to us, a little hesitant, and ask 'How old is she? Was she real? Was she really alive then or is she pretending?" They were pretty much unable to reconcile the math, which they did understand, their knowledge of a human lifetime, and the fact that their experience of talking to someone in the past felt so real to them. In other words, their cognitiion about time did not override their perceptions.
As to whether anybody really 'gets' time, there's truth to that. Adults can certainly have some gut understanding of 500 years, but I think the sense of understanding, even if you think hard about it, is pretty tough once you are talking about 5-10,000 years, let alone geologic time. And finally, there are elements of conceptualizing time that are purely cultural. In Western culture, we most often think of time as linear, events happening sequentially, and created the divisions of time we use today based on our observations of the sun. But other cultures have created other means of imagining and tracking time, emphasizing the circular/cyclical patterns of the year, using lunar time, or constructing time around natural events such as animal migrations, ice melting or freezing, and so on. To some extent, what we say about whether kids 'understand' time is really being measured relative to the culture's dominant notion of what time is. I'm among those who believe that people construct their own understandings gradually, and throughout their lives, I think, we end up working to reconcile the sense of time we develop based on our own observations with the ideas of time that our cultures have embraced.
posted by Miko at 7:00 AM on May 8, 2008 [5 favorites]
In short, time is like reading and mathematical understanding - it's not the kind of development that consists of a flipped switch - one day you don't get time, the next day you do. It's a stepped progression of gradual understanding. For instance, really young kids can predict routine - it's naptime, the following things are going to happen; it's bath time, the following things are going to happen. At preschool age they've got morning, afternoon, evening, and so on, but God help them understand how long it is until their birthday. By kindergarten, most kids can understand a little bit about clock time - that when the clock says "2:00" it's recess time. Some start to wear a watch and tell time around this age, especially if parents work on it with them, but it's by no means widespread. And despite being able to tell you what the watch says, the conception of length of time or relative time scales is pretty much zilch. Young kids live in a "forever present" where everything is as it is right now. Death is a wicked hard thing at this age, because the dead person/animal must be somewhere since everything always exists. Most kindergarten and some preschool curricula spend a lot of time on calendar awareness -- what month is your birthday, what are the seasons and what weather goes with them, what day of the week is today, that sort of thing. There's explicit teaching of the social construction of calendar and clock time. This generally continues in school curricula with some degree of emphasis until 3rd grade (age 8) or so. This is why there's little teaching of history, as a subject, until 3rd grade - instead, kids study 'social studies' topics like their own towns and community life, neighborhoods, mapping, etc. They certainly read stories and understand that we talk about other times, but the degree to which they 'get' it is pretty low.
By age 8, most kids are down with clock and calendar time, but are still working on historical time and relative time scales. At this age, you see lots of timelines in curricula, so kids can get an idea how many of their lifetimes ago something happened, and grasp that things happen in a chronological order. Most kids at this age can tell time, though visually, analog clocks often take some work. Clocks are essntially graphs, so when kids get graphs, they can get analog clocks. There is a gradual mastery of time within a person's life - today, a week, a month, years. History, as in things that happened before your lifetime, starts to be part of school learning in 4th and 5th grade - but even then, is problematic. I used to teach in a museum where we had historic roleplayers come and talk to the kids in character - they were portraying the year 1876. Quite often, after the program, 5th and even 6th graders would come up to us, a little hesitant, and ask 'How old is she? Was she real? Was she really alive then or is she pretending?" They were pretty much unable to reconcile the math, which they did understand, their knowledge of a human lifetime, and the fact that their experience of talking to someone in the past felt so real to them. In other words, their cognitiion about time did not override their perceptions.
As to whether anybody really 'gets' time, there's truth to that. Adults can certainly have some gut understanding of 500 years, but I think the sense of understanding, even if you think hard about it, is pretty tough once you are talking about 5-10,000 years, let alone geologic time. And finally, there are elements of conceptualizing time that are purely cultural. In Western culture, we most often think of time as linear, events happening sequentially, and created the divisions of time we use today based on our observations of the sun. But other cultures have created other means of imagining and tracking time, emphasizing the circular/cyclical patterns of the year, using lunar time, or constructing time around natural events such as animal migrations, ice melting or freezing, and so on. To some extent, what we say about whether kids 'understand' time is really being measured relative to the culture's dominant notion of what time is. I'm among those who believe that people construct their own understandings gradually, and throughout their lives, I think, we end up working to reconcile the sense of time we develop based on our own observations with the ideas of time that our cultures have embraced.
posted by Miko at 7:00 AM on May 8, 2008 [5 favorites]
...also, it's possible for kids to learn to tell clock time and use it without understanding that it represents units of measure being counted.
posted by Miko at 7:02 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by Miko at 7:02 AM on May 8, 2008
Fantastic comment, Miko.
At the other end of the learning scale, last year I was tutoring a split first/second-grade classroom in beginning clock-face reading...alongside high-school graduates who had never been introduced to the concepts of "quarter past" and "quarter to" X.
posted by kittyprecious at 7:43 AM on May 8, 2008
At the other end of the learning scale, last year I was tutoring a split first/second-grade classroom in beginning clock-face reading...alongside high-school graduates who had never been introduced to the concepts of "quarter past" and "quarter to" X.
posted by kittyprecious at 7:43 AM on May 8, 2008
I also learned about time in 2nd grade. I think I was sick the day Mrs. Barna taught: "x of" and "x to" i.e. quarter to 4. I still don't get it and the times that I have asked someone to explain it to me, it slides out of my mind.
posted by spec80 at 8:58 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by spec80 at 8:58 AM on May 8, 2008
Last summer I was talking to a girl who was 5 years old and would be starting kindergarten that September. I was telling her that we would start to have firefly sightings in the evenings in about two weeks. She said, "Oh, that's too far away!" and I said something like, "Two weeks isn't that long, it'll pass quickly." And then she responded, "Yeah, but I'm just a kid. To me, two weeks is a really long time." Seemingly, at that age she had an understanding that time passes differently for her than it does for me.
posted by xo at 9:20 AM on May 8, 2008
posted by xo at 9:20 AM on May 8, 2008
When my daughter was a little less than a year old --- perhaps she was signing and understanding, but not yet talking --- she would get impatient sometimes about food. I would make ten-minute suppers and tell her that "supper will be ready when the big hand points up. Right now it points that way, so we have to wait." This actually worked.
Now she's about 30 months. We get a lot of mileage out of "when the big hand points this way," not so much out of "when the little hand points this way," more luck again with the difference between "tomorrow" and "later this week." She seemed to clue in last year when we told her that New Baby would come "a long time from now, when it gets cold," and then stayed pregnant for another half year.
She knows "two minutes," because that's how long her timeouts are. I think she understands longer periods of time, but doesn't know about weeks or months or o'clocks.
at xo: I have this idea that perceived duration gets judged against cumulative experience. For instance, the year you're six lasts forever. But a six-year-old only has three or four years of memories that they're adding to, so the relative contribution of the current year is enormous. The year you're 26 --- was I ever 26? what was I doing that year? where did I live? That year's memories have two decades' worth to compete with, and can't occupy so much of your attention.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:36 AM on May 8, 2008
Now she's about 30 months. We get a lot of mileage out of "when the big hand points this way," not so much out of "when the little hand points this way," more luck again with the difference between "tomorrow" and "later this week." She seemed to clue in last year when we told her that New Baby would come "a long time from now, when it gets cold," and then stayed pregnant for another half year.
She knows "two minutes," because that's how long her timeouts are. I think she understands longer periods of time, but doesn't know about weeks or months or o'clocks.
at xo: I have this idea that perceived duration gets judged against cumulative experience. For instance, the year you're six lasts forever. But a six-year-old only has three or four years of memories that they're adding to, so the relative contribution of the current year is enormous. The year you're 26 --- was I ever 26? what was I doing that year? where did I live? That year's memories have two decades' worth to compete with, and can't occupy so much of your attention.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:36 AM on May 8, 2008
The "cumulative experience" idea doesn't completely explain that phenomenon. It's more the frequency of new experiences that seems to slow time down. Children encounter new experiences and notice new things on a daily basis, and are actively involved in building a worldview from the input they're receiving. During adolescence people begin noticing and spending more time in interior verbal monologue, which distracts us from noticing as much, and begin to do more abstract thinking, which reduces the importance of concrete information. Our brains also have a tendency to stop reporting stuff that we already know quite well -- otherwise we'd feel constantly bombarded by everything from the color of the walls to the stuff on our coffee tables, having to constantly notice and react. For kids, time seems to feel slow because they are existing in that noticing, concrete, constructing present quite a bit more of the time than adults.
Interestingly, though, adults can still experience it. There are years which are a blur that I have little specific memory of - the year I was 28 is a good example. A few things stand out, the rest is indistinct. But the year I was 29, I can recall a lot -- where I was most of the time, the clothes I had, things people said, activities I did - because it was a big year of transition in my life - new job, new place to live, new friends, new activities. The relative amount of noticing and reacting I had to do was greater than the year before that, when I had been living in one place for 4 years. The need to stay engaged in the present both created more memory and slowed my sense of the passage of time, so that year seems somehow equivalent to more than a single year as compared with the rest of my life.
I've always said, if you want life to feel longer, travel and learn a lot. Newness makes time slow down and makes you live more in the present.
posted by Miko at 12:45 PM on May 8, 2008 [1 favorite]
Interestingly, though, adults can still experience it. There are years which are a blur that I have little specific memory of - the year I was 28 is a good example. A few things stand out, the rest is indistinct. But the year I was 29, I can recall a lot -- where I was most of the time, the clothes I had, things people said, activities I did - because it was a big year of transition in my life - new job, new place to live, new friends, new activities. The relative amount of noticing and reacting I had to do was greater than the year before that, when I had been living in one place for 4 years. The need to stay engaged in the present both created more memory and slowed my sense of the passage of time, so that year seems somehow equivalent to more than a single year as compared with the rest of my life.
I've always said, if you want life to feel longer, travel and learn a lot. Newness makes time slow down and makes you live more in the present.
posted by Miko at 12:45 PM on May 8, 2008 [1 favorite]
First grade teacher here. We just began our "Telling Time" unit of study this morning. It's difficult for them to understand why and how sixty minutes make an hour. The kids are not able to differentiate between 5 years from now and 50 years from now; it's all an eternity to them. They do comprehend how long a week is, but months are another story. They think "a month from now" = a really, really, really long time from now.
posted by HotPatatta at 3:35 PM on May 8, 2008
posted by HotPatatta at 3:35 PM on May 8, 2008
I spend alot of time with preschoolers these days (three and four year olds). Many of their parents will do the "It's time for us to leave when the big hand is pointing at the 6" thing and it seems to work well. The kids have a feel for roughly how long it takes the big hand to travel various distances.
With both my sons, I started talking about things that would happen "in two minutes" or "in five minutes" between 12 and 18 months and this definitely helped with transitions. The older, now four, definitely understands increments up to 90 minutes now.
I was talking to a four-year old on her birthday and told her she was a quarter of the way to getting her driver's licence, and explained that she was four now and after three more fours she would be old enough to drive. She seemed to get it, but I'm sure she doesn't comprehend what that much time really feels like.
And that's really the issue when you're talking about years into the future. Your concept of the passage of time is based on your lifetime. That's why the years seem to go by faster as you age (when you're 5, a year is 20% of your life -- when you're 40, it's only 2.5%). I don't think anyone can really comprehend what it would be like to live to be four times as old as they currently are.
posted by winston at 7:14 PM on May 8, 2008
With both my sons, I started talking about things that would happen "in two minutes" or "in five minutes" between 12 and 18 months and this definitely helped with transitions. The older, now four, definitely understands increments up to 90 minutes now.
I was talking to a four-year old on her birthday and told her she was a quarter of the way to getting her driver's licence, and explained that she was four now and after three more fours she would be old enough to drive. She seemed to get it, but I'm sure she doesn't comprehend what that much time really feels like.
And that's really the issue when you're talking about years into the future. Your concept of the passage of time is based on your lifetime. That's why the years seem to go by faster as you age (when you're 5, a year is 20% of your life -- when you're 40, it's only 2.5%). I don't think anyone can really comprehend what it would be like to live to be four times as old as they currently are.
posted by winston at 7:14 PM on May 8, 2008
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by amyms at 12:09 AM on May 8, 2008