You Are Young and Life Is Long: Understanding Young Children's Experience of Time

You are Young and Life is Long:

Understanding Young Children’s Experience of Time

Thorne (2007: 150) has suggested that it is central to the interdisciplinary study of children and childhoods that we articulate ‘different types of temporality’. In this paper I will argue that the work of Norbert Elias can provide an important theoretical advancement for understanding society, by looking through a young child’s eyes at their experience of time: ‘The sociality integral to human beings only becomes apparent if one is aware what relations to other people mean for the small child’ (Elias, 2010: 28–29).

Elias argues that we need to clearly define the difference and relation­ship between biological evolution, social development and history. In bio­logical evolution, ten thousand years is a very short period. The changes that have taken place in the biological constitution of our species are relatively slight. However, in social development ten thousand years is a considerable period of time because the changes in social organisation that have taken place are relatively enormous. Historical change is possible because the experiences gath­ered from one generation need to be transmitted to the next. But in terms of the ‘biographical’ time it takes for young children to grow into old men and women, long-term social developments take place so slowly that they seem to stand still. Passed on from one generation to the next, young children need to learn and internalise an enormous social fund of knowledge about the world. I will illustrate my argument by reviewing some of the recent investigations that have explored temporality as a non-linear and relational process in the lives of young children, focusing on the processes that enable them to regulate their feelings and behaviour to the social institution of time.