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Children Perceive Time Differently

By Judy Wood In Insight

Exercising or working to your potential is a hard for everyone, which is part of the reason that there are so many fitness coaches and exercise plans for adults. Staying on task and achieving fitness goals takes a lot ingenuity, even for people who really want to do the work and have fully mature brains. It’s even harder for kids, who can expend seemingly limitless energy through play, but aren’t always inherently interested in the structured work that is required to gain “next level” skills.

They’ve Lived Less Time

Children’s relationship with time is part of the challenge. Children perceive time differently than adults do, for several reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay to fully explore. Part of the answer is that kids haven’t lived as long, so a day or a week seem much longer to them because they have less stored memories to compare against. We all remember how long even a single day seemed when we were kids, while now we are continually amazed that months or even years fly past at breakneck speed. It is partly due to the fact that we’ve experienced more time, so a day or a week are smaller fractions of our total life experience. Our brains also process memories faster, and do a few other things differently as well, which I’ll look at in future blogs.

So, how do you get kids to work towards a long-term goal or develop a disciplined level of skill? One possible answer is to think of long-term goals from their perspective. Telling them to work hard so they graduate high school is not going to create much intrinsic motivation, they haven’t lived enough years to be able to make sense of that much time. Having them set a goal for two weeks from now is much more conceivable for them because they know what two weeks actually feels like. They can break two weeks down into ten weekdays and four weekend days; and can actually imagine themselves moving through that chunk of time to do something. Parents do this all the time, breaking long activities into small chunks. The younger the child, the smaller the distance into the future we should ask them to look.

Children have similarly, elongated perceptions of even small increments of time, like hours, minutes or seconds. We have to keep that in mind If we want them to do something that is challenging or difficult. Fortunately, there are simple techniques to help them stay motivated and on task. Here are two easy ones.

Start At The Top

It’s easier to get a child to do ten pushups if you start at “10” and count backwards. They are used to counting up to higher numbers and viewing them as destinations, as ends to activities. Counting down changes their brains’ perception of the activity because they feel like they are starting “at the top” and working backwards. This strategy works for adults as well. The next time you are exercising, set a timer instead of a stopwatch, or count backwards while you hold your plank. Even though our adult brains know there is no difference between counting backwards or forwards, it seems like time passes more quickly when we count down, and that means it doesn’t feel as hard to do.

Count Different

What’s the tenth letter in the alphabet? It’s the letter “j”, but you probably had to think about it, and you had to use a slightly different part of your brain than you employ to process numbers. Counting alphabetically is not as natural, and requires kids to focus attention on the count, and that takes their mind off the time that is passing, and the effort they are expending. They get good at counting alphabetically after a while, so you can switch up the count by alternating letters and numbers, by starting at a different place in the alphabet (“let’s do pushups to the letter ‘m’ starting from the letter ‘d’. Ready?”) and so forth. Again, this is worth trying in your own exercise regimen.

Your Time Matters

There are lots of other strategies, sometimes known as “hacks”, that we can use to change how kids view time, and therefore help kids accomplish a little more with the time they have. Smart educators know these techniques and come up with new ones to keep things fresh. However, the most important part of a child’s education is still the time parents, teachers and mentors devote to each child. No matter what techniques we employ to teach them, giving them some of our own time is the real secret ingredient to kids’ success.