Lacking More Than Foresight: Do Children Even Comprehend Time?

Children are famously bad at considering the future consequences of their actions, but some evidence suggests this criticism is slightly off-the-mark: they may not even comprehend "time" in the same way adults do. A variety of findings from multiple lines of research tentatively support this surprising claim about the limitations of children's cognition.

Based on the delay of gratification literature, we know that children will reliably choose "less now" rather than "more later"—even at relatively short delays. Children may not be able to adequately represent the value of a future reward as strongly as the value of a present reward, and hence cannot make the same comparison that adults do. Alternatively, children may not accurately predict (and hence, cannot prepare for) their subsequent impulse to receive the reward sooner rather than later. According to these interpretations, children's failure to delay gratification results from difficulty with representing future states.

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