From now to then: Parents and children talk about the past and the future

Life in modern cities exposes a young child to numerous concepts of time in that from birth there are schedules for all activities, set times for them to begin and end, order in which they must happen, and so on. The objective of this study was to explore the different contexts in which children are exposed to temporal concepts, and to look more in depth into the negotiations of temporal concepts between children and their parents at dinner. The participants included 20 families and children who were recruited from preschools and day care centers and investigated in regards to the presence of temporal concepts and artifacts in their daily routines. Families were asked to record four dinner conversations and fill out a questionnaire that assessed the presence and use of time in the house. Children were asked to perform a photo sequencing task of their daily school activities, to answer questions from an interview, and they took a language test (PPVT-III) assessing their receptive vocabulary. Schools were observed for temporal structure of activities and quality time children benefited from the teachers. Results indicated that mothers and fathers play different roles in teaching their children about temporal concepts. I also found that children's temporal knowledge relates to their verbal development, to past and future talk habits at home, to the structure of activities at school and the individual attention children get, and to the use of conventional time language by parents. This was an exploratory study that pointed to the need for a longitudinal study that can establish more direct relationships among the variables.