How quick has this year gone?

There were so many times when my son said things that were so much older than he actually was. And this was one of those times. We were driving to school with his favourite song on and I could see he had his fingers crossed and he looked at me, sighed and said:

“How quick has this year gone?”

I’m not sure this constitutes as a question, more of an exclamation but as my site is called The Questions of My Child we will have to call it a question!!! This “question” was followed by:

“Why has this year gone quicker than last year?”

And isn’t that what you say every year of your adult life like wow where has the year gone? Except he is 5 (chronologically anyway). And there are a few issues I have with this question. Firstly how does he know how far into the year we are. I know he will write the date at school but for most kids they will write the date down and never even give it a second thought. Not my son, he’s busy wondering why this year has gone so quick.  And how does he know that this year has gone quicker than last year. Can he even remember last year? And again, he is only 5 (nearly 6). Let me repeat that….he is only 5 years old!!!

An easy explanation of this is that for a 5 year old, 1 year equates to 20% of their life but for a 50 year old, 1 year equates to 2% of their life so there is more time % wise when you are younger therefore it seems slower!! The feeling of time going quick is linked to anxiety for example as adults we try to slow time down by practising mindfulness which helps us feel less stressed and more relaxed. No wonder my son was so stressed if he thought the year had gone quick. At 5 years old he was thinking things that adults think. He was feeling things that adults feel. And as fascinating as this is, and it really is. So fascinating I have managed to write a blog every week for the last 30 odd weeks out of his questions there is a part of me that just wants him to be worried about where his favourite toy dinosaur is, not how quick time has gone or what would happen if the world falls down, or whether we can restart.

So why has this year gone quicker than last year?

There is a theory that time speeds up as we get older, it doesn’t actually speed up but subjectively we feel like it does and there is very little research as to why. One hypothesis (Bejan, A. (2019). Why the days seem shorter as we get older. Cambridge University Press.)  is based on the physics of neural signal processing and that we process information slower as we age. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images relative to our older selves. Which is really interesting as I believe my son to have a sensory processing disorder. I believe he processes absolutely everything, and it is too much for him to deal with. So if I, as a neurotypical, went into a restaurant I would filter out all the stuff I didn’t need and focus on speaking to the waiting staff that greeted me. My son would walk in and hear everything, plates clattering, knives and forks scraping, chairs moving, bells ringing, people talking, background music and it would be overwhelming for him. Totally overwhelming…..hence why we plan and prepare for these situations, and a lot of the time we just don’t go into these situations. He notices everything so any time I have bought something new for our new house he notices straight away. He knows if something has moved place. He knows when someone has had a hair cut, the amount of times he will see my husband after a few days of not seeing him and the first thing he says is “Have you had your haircut” is really quite something. I picked him up from school one day after not seeing him for a few days as he had been at his dads, and he came out of school and the first thing he said to me was:

“You have got new shoes on.”

And I did indeed have new shoes on.

One day we were travelling in the car and when we got home, he shouted:

“That has taken us exactly 54 minutes to get home.”

And it had!! He must have checked the car clock getting in and then checked it getting out and worked out the time. For a 5 year old that is actually amazing. So you can see he doesn’t miss a trick. Ever. Maybe, just maybe if he thought time was getting quicker then his sensory processing was slowing down. I knew that was wishful thinking on my part.

Another theory is that there is a “switch” that occurs when you are around 6 years old where you start to think of time as absolute. This means that time remains the same length of time for everyone. The concept of time does not change person to person. A study carried out in Hungary (Stojić, S., Topić, V. & Nadasdy, Z. Children and adults rely on different heuristics for estimation of durations. Sci Rep 13, 1077 (2023).) suggested that younger children (4-5 years old) thought eventful videos were longer than uneventful videos even though they were the same length of time. Whereas older children said the uneventful video was the longest video. The researchers concluded that there was a “switch” that occurred from 6 onwards where time became absolute. Children learned to tell the time and relied on that instead of their perception of time hence time started to go quicker. This would also fit in with my son because he is nearly 6.

But how did I answer the question for him in the car in the ten minutes I had with him before he went into school. Well I didn’t start spouting off studies that had been carried out on whether time does get quicker as you get older that is for sure. Of course I have googled this question since and done a bit of research into it but at the time I didn’t know all this. I gave the classic parent conundrum that all parents say from time to time…….

“The days are long but the years are short.”

And they are. The last 7 days had been some of the longest days of my life. I knew I was in a bad way. Any bad time I had in my life I gave myself a day to sort myself out. 1 day. And that worked. I got a plan in place and I sorted myself out. I was now 7 days into my allowed 1 day of self pity. I couldn’t get a plan in place. I was planless and I didn’t like it. I was battling with school, losing a little bit of hope as each day passed, battling with the “system”. But the years were short. We were in April already so my son was right the year had gone quick!! So when I gave my answer my son nodded, as though I was right that the days were long….and I thought that is the end of it…until 1 second later when I knew his brain had moved on and he asked…..

“If there are 12 hours in a night and 12 hours in a day, why does the night go quicker than the day then?”

Time. Time and more Time. It is without doubt his favourite subject!!