English, swimming, art studio, riding school … From the first years, children are included in the frantic rhythm of “adult” life, a continuous race for achievements. As a result, having managed everything, they often do not have time to the main thing – to understand what time is and how to dispose.
Когда у 5-летней Кати выпал первый молочный зуб, она горько расплакалась. Parents tried to reassure her: “It’s great! So you will become an adult very soon “. “I don’t want to be an adult,” the girl sobbed. – I do not want to work until the night, as you!”
And the 13-year-old Anton brought to a papa psychologist. “My son threw everything: he was engaged in music and karate, played chess well,” said the father, “and then he suddenly said that he didn’t want to do anything else and he would lie on the couch for a year”.
9-year-old twins Nastya and Nikita (school, English, Spanish, dancing, swimming and theater studio) on Sundays do not give a passage to parents: “Mom, we are bored. Mom, tell me, what can we do?”
Katya, Anton and Nastya and Nikita turned out to be hostages of the adult system of values: wanting to give their children as much as possible, their parents thoroughly planned their time that they did not leave them for a second for their own desires, which means that games and dreams.
Feel the course of time
Playing and dreaming, the child knows the world. But besides this in the game, he learns to feel time, and without this feeling any schedule will forever remain an empty formality for him.
“Perhaps, only walking around the park with a stroller, I suddenly really felt the time it passes,” Katya admits, the mother of a two-year-old daughter. – I want Anyuta to see how spring is replaced by winter, how trees and herbs live, so we try to walk with her more. And in the nursery on the windowsill, we arranged a small garden and watch how parsley and dill grow. “.
Children who grew up in the village know more about time than city children. Time for them is visual: it is so much necessary that the sowed onion is sprouted, and so much – so that tomatoes and apples ripen.
“Of course, modern farmers do not think to give to their children lengthy lectures on the timing of field work. Our ancestors-peasant did not do this. The situation is: children living in rural areas are constantly involved in a certain rhythm due to nature itself, and therefore it is much easier to feel the course of time. And city parents have to teach this to children specially, ”explains the psychophysiologist Dmitry Kolesov.
He advises to start with a simple one: when mom is going to leave, she can show on the clock where the arrows at the time of her return will be. But in order for the child to learn to look at the future with optimism, she should certainly keep the promise and return at the concerned time.
You need to introduce children not only with minutes and seconds, so the teacher Konstantin Smalous recommends making a calendar on which the number, month and year must be set manually. At first, parents change dates, but by about four, children begin to be interested in the calendar and get used to doing it on their own – so the time becomes real for them. “Tomorrow” is no longer just an abstract word, but a very specific, almost tangible thing associated with a new number on the home calendar.
We perceive time in different ways
In adults and children, time flows at different speeds. “The metabolic processes in the child’s body occur very quickly, which means that every hour is more filled with events than an hour of an adult,” explains the psychophysiologist Tatyana Tsekhmistrenko. – With age, metabolic processes slow down, and we feel how our time begins to run faster. “.
For many children,
up to 12 years of category of the future and past tense are simply meaningless. An outstanding Swiss psychologist, the author of the operational concept of human intelligence, Jean Piaget claimed: only by this moment the brain of children matures so much that they acquire the ability to mentally correlate the past, present and future.
