The Limits of Time

Time is an abstract concept, difficult to define, yet it gives rhythm to our lives: the before, the during and the after. Human beings are born into the present, and only begin to understand the before and after as they go through their daily experiences. These before and after experiences define their present, which in turn define their after, and become their before.

It's a continuous cycle that never stops, and is in perpetual change, in perpetual motion. If the present of your experiences with your child is what defines the future of your experiences with your child, how would you like to define your present? What future experiences are you leading your child towards? What do you want to guide your relationship with your child towards? Children depend on time far more than we realize most of the time. They depend on the way we structure time for them, with them, so that they can enjoy the present without losing sight of the future, while at the same time remembering the past, in order to correct bad times and build better ones.  The routines, limits and constants we create to accompany our child's every moment are essential to their self-building. So, let's take a moment to observe and analyze their temporal and physical environment: do our children benefit from an organized and structured environment that allows them to safely carry out their child's work: building themselves through the work of their hands, experimenting - sensorially in the case of the little ones, intellectually in the case of the older ones - under the watchful eye of the adults around them?  Do they have opportunities to observe, verbalize and seek to understand the world around them through the rhythm of the week, seasons, holidays, days of the week, months of the year, passing hours, and history for older children? 

In our environments, time sometimes stands still, the time of a lively, playful discussion overheard between two 9-year-old students, who are discussing the relationship between the future tense and the past tense. It stops when we have 3 students in their third year at the children's house, who are now really at home, after all this time spent in the environment and who, animated by a real knowledge of almost all the material in the classroom, continue to explore and discover this material in a new light: during work with solids they realized that many of the materials and therefore objects around them were cubes, spheres, cylinders, pyramids, prisms! What a joy for them to make the connection between this abstraction made concrete, these abstract notions linked to their everyday sensorial experiences. Just the time for a three-way conversation, an encounter and the fruit of months and months of work with the material, each at their own pace. An abstract notion understood and internalized for life. This is what your children do in their own environment.

Ludmila