‘The quickest way for a parent to get a child’s attention is to sit down and look comfortable.’
Lane Olinhouse
As a parent, you know how the concept of time radically changes as soon as there’s a baby around. Minutes can seem like hours when your little one won’t stop crying or refuses to sleep, and hours can pass like minutes when it seems you’ve surely only just finished feeding your baby and yet somehow it’s time to do it all again. Babies just don’t follow the conventions of time as we know it. As Catharine Kedjidjian of the website BabyZone writes, ‘Babies start life with a distorted concept of time: night can be day and everything is now.’
We are at the behest of our babies. We find ourselves asking questions like, ‘Is there time for me to get dressed before the baby needs feeding again?’ or even, ‘Do I have time to go to the toilet before the baby needs me?’ And the truth is, there really is no way of telling if there is actually time or not; when our children are babies there are countless days when we never quite have enough time to get fully dressed, or to brush our hair, or even to drink a cup of tea while it’s still warm. As parenthood begins, time is no longer our own, and either gladly or reluctantly, we hand it over to our babies and join the ranks of selfless providers and carers as per the tacit new-parent contract: any time, any place, anywhere.
‘While I feed my baby I can eat my lunch with one hand or pick things up off the floor with my feet. I have my hair tied back in a pony-tail – well, that stays put for days without any attention. You learn to just get by when you have a baby.’
Mum of two – master of multi-tasking
Carla Poole, Susan A. Miller EdD, and Ellen Booth Church explain on Scholastic.com how this early parenting is important in forming the beginnings of a baby’s understanding of time:
‘A multitude of nurturing moments helps babies’ natural body rhythms and schedules take shape. Loving relationships are formed and life becomes a more predictable pattern of people, things, and events.’
As our babies move towards toddlerhood, time begins to take on a more recognisable and predictable structure again. But there is no concept of hours or minutes in a toddler’s mind; instead there’s nap time, milk time, nappy-changing time, lunch time, snack time, story time, play time, bath time and bed time. They’re grasping the abstract nature of time through the routines and patterns of their daily activity. They’re certainly not sticking to any clock, and woe betide any parent who tries to keep their toddler ‘on time.’ I’ll never forget my own battles at the sandpit when my son, then two, would clearly demonstrate that his time to play had not finished – despite whatever I might think. He just would not have it that it was time to leave, that the park was closing. He would lie down on his back, stiff as a board, refusing to budge. Ah, happy memories.
As Carla, Ellen and Susan point out, two-year-olds have all the time in the world; it’s us adults who never have enough. When your child is a toddler it’s clear that they are still in charge of time – and they can be incredibly forceful in deciding how it will be spent, and often frustratingly unrealistic.
The good news is that as toddlers move towards preschool age, they begin to understand the concept of ‘before’ and ‘after’. This can be very useful in moving the day along smoothly; we, the grown ups, can then start to be more in charge of time, with simple authoritative statements that include these concepts: we’ll play outside after nap time, or, before we have our snack we must wash our hands.
Preschoolers also start to get the idea of when and then, which is lovely for either reviewing the day, reporting it to granny, say, or using it to talk about the future: when you’ve taken off your shoes and coat, then you can go and play. There are lots of positive and playful methods of establishing rules and routines in the chapter Sanity Savers.
But what about the times in between the transitional moments in the day, when we’re not needed to direct, help or move things along to the next, or more suitable, activity?
When children play
These in-between times – when your little one is oblivious to time passing and is happily occupied, independently busy, involved in an activity – are like manna from heaven when we first encounter them. And it’s in these moments we discover that, while they still need subtle supervision, our children really don’t need us to entertain them, or to be involved. This begins very early on, even when our children are babies, as parenting expert Janet Lansbury discovered with her three-month-old baby.
‘I placed her on her back on a blanket near me and watched. My needy, vocal baby, the one I’d been entertaining and engaging almost every moment she was awake, spent nearly two hours in this position, peaceful and content. She knew I was there, shot an occasional glance my direction, but didn’t seem to need a thing from me except, perhaps, my appreciative presence. And, oh, I was beyond appreciative.’
On her website (www.janetlansbury.com) Janet has beautiful video footage of babies happily playing on their own, playing with their toes, just looking around them or at something close-up, or happily reaching out and making efforts to get toys and objects, for much longer than we might think possible.
As a child grows into a toddler and preschooler he or she becomes increasingly capable of entering this zone, and for longer, where they find their flow; they are busy, they are concentrating on something with an impressively long attention span; they are playing independently. When we see this ‘magic’ happening we are often tempted to watch and marvel at their brilliance, and for some parents it’s very tricky not to interrupt them – albeit unintentionally. But also, it may occur to us that we might be able to take advantage of this little bit of freedom. If we simply let the children carry on playing, maybe we could make that quick phone call? Or read the newspaper for a minute? But as writer Lane Olinhouse points out, it seems the moment we sit down and look comfortable (or equivalent) we suddenly have the undivided attention of our child.
Sometimes, young children can’t help but to tune in to us and what we’re doing, the moment we think they’re immersed enough for us to tackle that chore or dash off that email. For every time we successfully step away and achieve something while they’re playing, there are many times when our little one is suddenly round our feet, needing us right now, when we were quite invisible to them just seconds before. And flag up to a toddler that you need them to ‘just wait a minute’ while you finish fixing the TV remote, or applying for a new car tax disc and you’re usually on a hiding to nothing. They need help to find their flow again, and it is on these occasions when 10-second set-ups can save the day.
Can young children really wait?
It seems not all young children challenge their parents in this way. Pamela Druckerman, author of French Children Don’t Throw Food has discovered that Parisian children definitely know how to ‘wait’. They are simply told to do so by their parents and teachers from very early on in their lives, and they apparently learn this skill rather successfully, developing the self-control and resourcefulness to self-distract until the waiting is done. By doing this, French children have earned themselves a reputation for being a tantrum-free, non-clingy and independent lot. This strict, no-nonsense tactic of simply being absolutely authoritative in stating when children need to wait clearly works for French parents, but to me it seems rather unnecessarily brutal. It also encourages unwanted behaviour, known in France as ‘betises’, which are basically the times when children are ‘getting up to no good’. According to Druckerman, in France this is apparently a common and almost expected side-effect of getting children