What children understand about New Year, and what we underestimate.
January
My youngest is six. On New Year's Eve she asked me: 'When the new year comes, does the old one disappear?' I said: no, it stays. It becomes last year. She thought about this for a while and then asked: 'Where does it go?'
This question — where does the past go? — is one of the genuine philosophical questions of childhood, and I think adults tend to underestimate how often children are sitting with it. The concept of time is not innate. It is learned. And the learning takes years.
Biologically, the brain's capacity to hold time — to maintain a sense of the past as past and the future as future while functioning in the present — develops through childhood. The hippocampus, which forms and retrieves episodic memories, matures gradually. Young children's memories are differently organised from adults'. They don't retain chronological sequences the way adults do: events cluster around emotional salience rather than temporal order.
This is why children often say things like 'yesterday' when they mean 'last year', or 'a long time ago' when they mean last Tuesday. They are not confused in the way we sometimes think. They are using a different organisational system.
They are not confused in the way we sometimes think. They are using a different organisational system — one that has room for the question of where last Tuesday went.
They are not confused in the way we sometimes think. They are using a different organisational system — one that has room for the question of where last Tuesday went.
They are using a different organisational system.
Materials, steps, what to notice — the hands-on part that makes the edition usable at home with your children this week.
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