Understanding Time Blindness
"Just Five More Minutes!" - Understanding Time Blindness in Your Child
Does this sound familiar? You tell your child they have 10 minutes to get ready, and when you come back, they’ve barely started. You ask them how long their homework will take, and they say "a few minutes," only for it to stretch into an hour.
This isn't defiance or laziness. It’s likely time blindness, a common challenge for many kids, especially those with ADHD.
Time blindness is the consistent difficulty with sensing the passage of time. For your child, "five minutes" and "thirty minutes" can feel almost exactly the same. They live in the "now," with very little sense of the "before" or the "after."
What’s Happening in the Brain?
Think of the brain’s prefrontal cortex as its manager or CEO. This part of the brain handles "executive functions" like planning, organizing, and, crucially, our internal sense of time.
For kids with time blindness, this manager has a faulty clock. This affects two key things:
Working Memory: They struggle to hold a sequence of events in their mind. Remembering how long a task took yesterday is difficult, making it impossible to accurately guess how long it will take today.
Future Planning: If you can't sense time passing, you can't plan for the future. The deadline that's an hour away feels infinitely distant and not real, so there's no sense of urgency to start now.
How You Can Help Make Time Visible
The key is to stop relying on your child's internal clock and start using external, visible tools. You need to help them see time.
Here are some concrete strategies that work:
Use Visual Timers: A standard digital countdown isn't enough. Use something like a Time Timer, where a colored disc physically disappears as time passes. This makes the concept of "time remaining" concrete and visible.
Break It Down: A big task like "clean your room" is too vague. Break it into tiny, timed steps. "Let's see if we can put all the LEGOs in the bin in the next 5 minutes." This provides clear, achievable goals.
Work Backwards: Instead of saying "We leave at 8:00 AM," work backward together. "Okay, we need to leave at 8:00. That means we need shoes and coats on at 7:55. To do that, we need to finish breakfast by 7:45..." This helps them see the sequence needed to meet a deadline.
Talk About Time: Make time a regular part of your conversation. "That cartoon is 10 minutes long, about the same amount of time it takes to brush your teeth and get into your pajamas." This helps them build a library of real-world time comparisons.
Externalize Everything: Use calendars, whiteboards, and phone alarms. The more you can take the job of "remembering" out of their brain and put it into the environment, the more successful they'll be.
Remember, your child isn’t trying to be difficult. Their brain is simply wired differently. By providing external structure and making time a visible, physical concept, you can empower them to manage their days and reduce frustration for everyone.