the four and five year old's understanding of the future: a preliminary study

Futures,Vol. 30, No. 9, pp. 913–922, 1998Pergamon 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

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THE FOUR AND FIVE YEAR OLD’SUNDERSTANDING OF THEFUTURE

A preliminary study

Jane Page

A significant imbalance exists in the lack of research on young children’s under-standings of the future. Recent studies highlight the difficulties experienced byyoung people in coming to terms with the future, which is generally viewedwith trepidation and ambivalence by children as young as ten years of age.While there is a growing body of research in this area, there has been very littleundertaken on how younger children think about these issues. To focus ourattention on younger children’s understandings and attitudes in this area wouldimprove our understanding on the development of young children’s thinking ontime and the future and assist us to implement strategies to counteract the nega-tivity and pessimism experienced at later years. 1998 Published by ElsevierScience Ltd. All rights reserved

A growing body of international research, consistently underlines the extent to whichyoung people have difficulty coming to terms with the future which they generally per-ceive to be threateningly remote and unstable.1–4 The children identified in these studiesfear the consequences of change, the threats of war, technological innovation andenvironmental destruction. Their expressions of what the world will be like in the futureprovides a sense of alienation from their understanding of the world future, which theyperceive in negative terms. A disparity also exists between their bleak understanding of

Jane Page may be contacted at the Department of Learning and Educational Development. The University ofMelbourne, Parkville 3052, Victoria, Australia. (Tel: 1 01 3 9344 0979; fax: 1 01 61 3 93440993; email:[email protected]).

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The four and five year old’s understanding of the future: J Page

world futures and a frequently more positive sense of their personal futures. This disparitysuggests an inability on the children’s part to perceive a connection between their ownfutures and the global future as well as their role in shaping it.

Much of the analysis of this literature thus far has taken into consideration broadersocio-cultural and educational factors, and to a lesser extent, methodological consider-ations. Hicks, more recently has drawn from a research study the importance of takinginto account the developmental status of the children when addressing their attitudes tothe future. While the research to which Hicks refers is concerned with children fromseven years of age and older, it is also important to take into consideration the perspec-tives of children as early as four and five years of age. An improved understanding ofthe development of young children’s thinking on time and the future from the early child-hood years onwards would highlight changes on children’s thinking over time and shedsome new light on the wider socio-cultural factors that might shape and influence them.5

The importance of considering younger children’s perspectives on time and thefuture can also be supported in part by conclusions drawn from the research that hasbeen undertaken in this area. These studies suggest that young children view the futuremore positively than their older counterparts. Lorenzo, for example, cites an Americancomparison of the drawings of pre-school, primary and high school children which con-cluded that the pre-school children perceived the future in more positive and humorousterms than their older counterparts whose drawings depicted the future with a ‘progressivelack of expressiveness and excitement.’6 Gisele Trommsdorff reached similar conclusionsin her study which found that children in first grade evaluated the future less positivelythan younger children and that their powers of anticipation were less developed thanthose of younger children.7 These findings correlate with Hick’s study of seven year oldchildren and their older counterparts which found that optimism towards personal andglobal futures decreases with age.8 The extent to which this is typical of younger chil-dren’s views on the future is drawn out further in a recent pilot project undertaken withAustralian four and five year old children.

Young children’s understanding of time

There can be no doubting that four and five year old children’s experience of time differssignificantly from the understandings of time encountered in later years. Time, as it isunderstood in the adult sense, is a complex and abstract concept. As Piaget and othershave underlined, the initial manifestations of the ‘adult’ understanding of time are onlyto be located from the age of about eight. At this point children can generally combinethe ability to represent mental images of different moments and translate them into achronology of time with an increasingly fluent acquisition and use of language.9,10 It isnot, in fact, until adolescence that children understand fully the extent to which time isa co-ordinated, conventionalised framework for distinguishing temporal sequences whichaffects all objects equally and simultaneously.

There has been some debate concerning the usefulness or otherwise of Piaget’sdevelopmental categories.11 There is no essential disagreement, however, regarding theconclusion that a developing awareness of time is limited, from the ‘adult’ point of view,by its being viewed purely in terms of the child’s own activities. At the ages of four andfive, time remains much more closely bound up with the child’s own movements andactions. The future remains far less clearly defined in the ‘adult’ sense in which it is

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generally understood. This follows directly from the young child’s earlier developmentwhen a nascent understanding of time is expressed in concrete and direct, subjectively-based terms. An example of this principle is the manner in which babies learn to antici-pate and overcome spatial and temporal distance by crying. Their attempts to bridge thegap of time and space with a call for gratification signal their fundamentally differentunderstanding of time.

By the time of what Piaget identifies as the second stage of development, childrenhave begun to develop an awareness of duration and different states in a progression ofevents.12 They continue to frame these developing concepts in personally-relevant termsduring the next stage of development, when they begin to set external events in orderand to develop a sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Here, once again, extrinsic events areunderstood only in relation to the child’s interactions with the environment.13 The child’sego-centrism remains evident, to a significant extent, in four and five year old children.When communicating with children of this age, the adult is required to translate theconcept of the future into terms which are directly relevant to the routine of the children’sexperiences. Adults referring to an event which will occur in four days, will thus needto explain that the event will occur ’in four sleeps time’. The children with whom theadults are communicating do not share the adults’ understanding of the distinctness ofdifferent moments in time. They cannot understand the concept of distance in time inthe same way that their elders do because they still do not recognise that time can everbe fully separate from them. Their ego-centrism disallows them from perceiving that timecan somehow exist entirely independently to them. The adult must thus express time interms which emphasise its direct connection (even on a physical level) with them.

It would be incorrect to conclude from this that the young child’s understanding oftime is so under-developed as to disallow any exploration of futures issues. A developingsense of time and the future remains crucial to young children. All their activities relateto these factors, even when they do not appear to have any immediate bearing on theconcept of time as we understand it. By physically manipulating clay, for example, thechild is engaging with the principles of desire, success, failure, expectation, effort andsatisfaction which have all been identified as fundamental base for an understanding ofthe future.14 This manner of engaging with the complex issue of time is in completeaccordance with the close correlation in younger children between a developing senseof time and physical development. Wallis, for example, has noted that the time spent bybabies crawling across distances in order to reach a desired object helps give rise to theirinternal sense of time.15 The act of crawling helps the baby to begin to understand therelationship between distance, anticipated time and satisfaction. The inter-relationsbetween motion and desire and a growing understanding of external temporal sequenceswill continue over time. They are still present in the four and five year old’s emphasis onthe physical manipulation of objects as a means of gaining control over the environment.

As children engage actively with the environment, they store, retrieve and combinefragments of information which subsequently form the basis of their developing con-cepts.16 The process of active learning remains fundamental because it provides childrenwith a continuing means of defining difficult concepts in directly relevant terms. As Tofflerhas emphasised, active learning enables children to feel connected to the environmentby allowing them to feel that they have gained some sense of control over the outsideworld.17 The principle of active learning also demonstrates the extent to which young

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children strive constantly to make sense of their place in the world by framing conceptsin terms of their connectedness with them.

The translation of ‘one week’ into ‘seven sleeps time’, should begin to alert us tothe extent to which young children feel personally connected to the future in a mannerwhich young adults cannot. The seemingly abstract nature of time constitutes one of themost challenging aspects involved in any attempt to understand the future. It has alsobeen stressed that individuals need to reorient their conception of time in order to regaina sense of its connectedness to them. Young children do not have to work, as adults do,at making this connection. In this respect, the young children’s ego-centrism and empha-sis on active learning should be viewed as positive factors. Young children’s sense ofpersonal connection with time enables them to exert a correspondingly greater sense ofcontrol over time than most adults. Since they regard time as ‘belonging’ to them, in thesense that it is in some way oriented towards their needs and desires, young children arebetter able to extend and manipulate time. They are freer to develop a more flexibleunderstanding of time than adults, with a correspondingly greater emphasis on imaginat-ive fantasies about the past and the future and a less rigid adherence to external time.18

By four and five years of age, children have more experiences to draw upon whenthey come into contact with new ideas, experiences and individuals. They have a betterchance of making sense of their world and more opportunity, due to increased mobility,to explore and expand the parameters of their world. The personal focus commentedupon above is accordingly combined with a developing sense of the outside world. Theextent to which four and five year old children are already attempting the challengingtask of reconciling their personal understandings with broader and more abstract frame-works can be seen in the thought processes of a group of fifteen four and five year oldswho were involved in a research study concerning younger children’s understandings ofthe future.

Aims and methods of research

In this pilot project I sought to listen to the testimonies of children as a means of counter-balancing the previous adult-centred theoretical account of child development.19 I feltthat, by allowing the children to speak for themselves, I might gain a better understandingof some of the ways in which they make sense of the concept of the future and theirplace within it. With this aim in mind, I interviewed fifteen four and five year old children,seven males and eight females attending an extended hours early childhood programmeattached to a University Department but situated off-campus and accessed equally bythe local community. Their ages ranged from four years and five months to five yearsand ten months. The research focus was qualitative in nature and involved asking individ-ual children at the outset of the interview what the future meant to them. The childrenwere then asked to draw a picture of themselves as adults and another picture of whatthe world would be like when they are adults. No visual stimulus was provided duringthe interview to direct or guide discussions or drawings, the emphasis being on incorpor-ating the children’s expressions/understandings of the future.

Research findings

Seven of the fifteen children participating in the study were not able to offer a definitionof the future (although they were able to explore the concept, as shall presently be

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discussed). The eight who did varied greatly. Only one child was able to define the termaccording to its conventional meaning. She defined the future as ‘Something that willhelp, that’s going to happen to you a bit later in life’ (interview fourteen, female, fiveyears and ten months). This child also associated age with difference. Things around herin the world in the future will be different because ‘They’ll be a bit old.’

Two children understood that the future was located within the time scale, butframed it in terms of the past: ‘It’s what happened with your life’ (interview ten, female,four years and ten months). The child quoted here was, at the same time, able to moveinto the future tense when answering the question of what she would do when she grewup. She again reverted to the past tense when discussing what the world would be likein the future. She interwove the past with the present and the future into her discussionof the global future and constantly drew upon her own knowledge and personal intereststo build upon a developing understanding of the concept:They had different coloured flowers and leaves and twisters like Dorothy [in The Wizard of Oz].And did you know in the olden days they had a twist a twister?..It could even blow the sunaway...You saw the blue air. It was very lovely in the olden days...But when it got so old and thebuilders came around and God made the trees and things...and then we had the country and thecity...and instead of the olden days they had this lovely [pause]...and then all the other worldswere poor and some were not...that’s what it looks like in the olden days...When it got very oldthey didn’t have this colourful world. They just had all different yucky things like they had gunshooting, like this. They had. And they were fighting each other and then everybody is killed and[pause] Well this is another world like here. Some builders heard it someone telled them that weshould make another world, so they did, and had it like this. There was cities and all sorts ofthings...you know this whole life up in the sky there is all different and the news follows what littlethings that they can find out what’s happening tomorrow afternoon or what little things.

This child’s understanding of the future is certainly confused from the adult point of view.It is clear from her comments that she has, nonetheless, been engaging carefully andsystematically with the concept from her own perspective. Her understanding of the futureresults from her ability to combine, in a highly creative and synthetic manner, a completeworld of her own from diverse sources, ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Bible andnews reportage. The child was able to connect, for example, the global orientation oftelevision news with its futures-perspective (‘the news follows what little things that theycan find out what’s happening tomorrow’) and to make the link between this understand-ing and the universal, cosmic perspective of Old Testament narrative (‘God’s building inthe olden days’).

Fantasy and creativity

What is striking in the previous interview is the extent to which the conviction of thechild’s fantasy enabled her to unify these disparate sources. She maintained completecreative control during all stages of the interview. At one point, for example, she conjuredup a vision of guns and humans ‘fighting each other and then everybody is killed’. Butbefore this was allowed to develop into a threateningly negative theme in her narrative,she effortlessly and decisively switched her attention to the creation of a new world (‘Wellthis is another world like here. Some builders heard it someone telled them that weshould make another world, so they did’). The sense of control and imaginative freedommanifested in these comments stand in stark contrast to the conventionalised, negativeexpressions of the future of older children and young adults referred to in the widerresearch literature in this area.

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The second child who described the future as the past offered the following expla-nation:

It means something a long time ago happened...Something terrible happened to the earth. Like ashooting star hit the earth (interview nine, male, five years and three months).

As with the previous child, this child recognised and immediately adopted a global, time-related perspective for describing the future. But he extended the global analogy furtherto encompass a vision of a universal cataclysm, possibly reflecting his awareness of thetheory of the meteorite collision which may have commenced the ice-age. The sameawareness of the global aspect of the future was evident in another child’s discussion.This child was not able to define the future, but was, nonetheless, able to describe theterm as meaning ‘To keep the world umm, to keep the world, umm, umm, umm’(interview one, female, four years and eleven months).

The last two responses appear to reflect an awareness of the ecological issues socommonly identified with the future. This was a relatively common theme of the inter-views. One child, for example, commented that there will be no trees in the futurebecause ‘they use them all for work’ (interview twelve, female, five years and eightmonths). Another child, who was initially unable to define the future, used environmentalissues to trigger an exploration of the global orientation of the future. When asked whathe wanted to be when he grew up, he replied that he would like to:

Make something, make something, something turn on the dark pollution in the sea into more ofthe same thing...to more food...and then you won’t have all the pollution in the sea. Then I wouldmake an underground tunnel for it to go through and then I think the trucks (interview seven, male,four years and eleven months).

This child perceived the problem of pollution only in the context of its solution as a resultof the force and ingenuity of his futures-oriented creativity. As a further demonstrationof this, he extended the vision, in the next breath, to additional feats of engineering.These future inventions, moreover, held a personal relevance since they reflected hisrecent visit to England, with its recently opened Channel tunnel. Everything in the futurewill be possible for this child since the future will provide him full scope for his incipientpowers of creativity and problem solving. So, also, in a similar respect, another childexpressed the wish that she might one day grow up to be a doctor so that she coulddesign automatic stairways that would enable patients to reach the operating table moreefficiently (interview ten, female, four years and ten months).

Personally-relevant global futures

When asked to describe what the world would be like in the future, the children wereconsistent in their desire to render the global perspective meaningful to their own experi-ences and outlooks. For three children, this meant drawing Australia, with two also draw-ing Melbourne (interviews two, six and eight, female, five years and four months, male,five years and six months, male, five years and two months). For others, it meant definingthe future as a place where they would partake of their favourite activities (such as fishing,roller-blading and going to gymbaroo) (interviews eight and fifteen, males, five years andtwo months and five years and one month).

More complex elaborations upon personally relevant perspectives of the world werealso possible. One child drew Kangaroo Island alongside Australia and Melbourne. This

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had a personal relevance since he had recently gone to Kangaroo Island on vacation(interview eight, male, five years and two months). Another child redefined the conceptof the world, noting that ‘There’s one big world. There’s lots of little planets on it’(interview six, male, five years and six months). The child did not wish to explore thebroader implications of this concept of planets within planets presumably because itoffered little scope for personal identification. The concept was visualised, instead, indirectly immediate terms. Melbourne became the biggest planet before the conceptmoved to a more personally interesting image of tropical islands with palm trees, ships,water and sharks. At this point, the child’s interest in the exploration of the fantasy athand took over and the global vision of the future was momentarily eclipsed by an elabor-ation on the theme of ships and sharks.

All the children exercised a considerable freedom and flexibility over their, at timesprotean, visions of the future. This flexibility also extended to their ideas of what theymight do in the future. One child, for example, progressed in his discussion of his futurelife from being a soldier, to an ambulance driver and then to a racing car driver (interviewsix, male, five years and six months). The progression of his ideas was dictated as muchby visual concerns as it was guided logically and conceptually since, by discussing thedetails in his drawings, he triggered his memory and refined his understandings.

One of the most striking features of this and the other interviews is the manner inwhich the children drew upon the global dimension of the future as a means of diffusingdisparate and occasionally negative images of the future within a positive and personallymeaningful framework. The global is made relevant, for these children, by being intercon-nected with the personal, and the negative, or the unsettling, is overturned by its beinginterconnected with the positive. Two children, for example, mentioned Bosnia. Thismust have entered their consciousnesses through news items on the horrors of the Serbo–Croatian war, then very much in the midst of its conflict. But the negative and incompre-hensibly complex ‘global’ associations of this image were neutralised by its being groupedwith positive and personally relevant images. The previously discussed child, for example,drew Bosnia alongside Australia, Melbourne and Kangaroo Island (interview eight, male,five years and two months). He demonstrated a similar control over his creation as thepreviously discussed child who overcame the potentially unsettling elements of her nega-tive fantasy about war by replacing them with a new and positive creation.

It is clear that these images of the future are influenced by the mass-media. Anotherexample of this is the child who wanted to be ‘a rock star like Michael Jackson’ whenhe grew up (interview seven, male, four years and eleven months) and we have alsonoted the number of children who commented on the environmental issues attached tothe future. But there is a striking contrast to be noted here between these mass-mediainfluences and discussions of the future by older children and young adults. In the fourand five year old children’s comments, the conventional imagery of the mass-mediaremains wholly subordinate to the children’s own perspectives. It forms one element ina rich array of source materials which are to be transformed into a new synthesis by theforce of the children’s flexibility and creativity. Thus the ’island’ of Bosnia, drawn by onechild alongside Melbourne, Australia, and Kangaroo Island, was placed beneath a freelyassociative fantasy of stairs leading from the world into a vision of a space inhabited bymonkeys and aliens (interview eight, male, five years and two months). The conventionaland the negative are here cancelled out by their being almost literally overwhelmed bythe energy and positivity of the child’s fantasy. By contrast, descriptions of the future by

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older children remained frequently locked within a received framework of conventional,dystopian science-fiction imagery. The difference in the level of creative freedom andcontrol is acute.

The concepts of growth and change and continuity

The children consistently addressed the future through the framework of growth. Most ofthem equated the future with being older, although the diversity of the ages identifiedby them as being old provides a further indication of their loosely defined understandingsof the ’adult’ measurement of time. For one child, attending school meant being an adult(interview one, female, four years and eleven months). For others, the ages identified asbeing grown up ranged from six, to seventeen, to twenty-two, to sixty (interviews eight,two, seven and five, male, five years and two months; female, five years and four months;male, four years and eleven months; male, four years and five months). They are thusnot locked into any preconceptions concerning roles that are appropriate to different ages.

Growing older enabled children to increase their level of understanding and controlover the world. One child, for example, would be able to kill a monster when he grewolder ‘because I’m sixty one...I’ll be able to kill him. I’m more than him, I’ll be sixty two(interview five, male, four years and five months).’ Another child’s understanding of thefuture involved a recognition of the limitations inherent in her level of understanding inthe present. For her, the future would be when she went to school and learned ‘lots ofthings that you can’t understand when you’re a little kid’ (interview thirteen, female, fiveyears and six months). She was able to stand back from her own development and expressthe belief in the generalised principle that being grown up meant ‘you sort of get moretruthful and things’. Her sense of the difficult, abstract nature of the process of getting‘more truthful and things’ was, nonetheless made more personally understandable andforeseeable by the fact that it was going to occur when she attended school and also bythe fact that her framing of the concept was influenced by her recent identification withthe school aged fictional character of Pippy Longstocking. The process of combining theglobal with the personal and the fantastic with the real enabled the children to gain asense of direct access to the global aspects of future time.

Change and continuity constituted another key framework through which many ofthe children explored the concept of the future. This progressed from a recognition ofdifference in age to an understanding of the way in which the world would change inthe future. One child, for example, believed the world of the future would be differentbecause the bark on trees would change with age and ‘the new trees would grow’(interview three, female, five years). A similar image was adopted by another child, whonoted that the trees in the future will look older because they will have ‘scratches’ onthem. They will also lose their leaves and grow tall (interview fourteen, female, five yearsand ten months). These children successfully defined the abstract nature of future changein terms which were tangible and which had direct applications to their everyday experi-ences. A similar, although slightly more complex, understanding was contained inanother child’s comment that the world was going to be different in the future because‘houses will be changed...’cause I saw people making them and making some houses upnear [his sibling’s] school and they got different and different and different’ (interviewseven, male, four years and eleven months). In this instance the child was drawing on

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his powers of observation (observing houses changing over time) and linking this to adifferent understanding of growth and development as a temporal concept.

More research is required on young children’s understandings of the future beforewe can ascertain the extent to which these expressions are typical of four and five yearold children’s views on the future. This study has however, made clear the difficultyexperienced by most four and five year old children when called upon to define thefuture from the adult perspective. Only three of the responses demonstrated a clear under-standing of the future as a temporal location or space, with two of them viewing it interms of the past. Even so, all fifteen were able to project themselves into a vision ofwhat they would be like when they grew up. Their world of the future offered them thepossibility to explore different scenarios, some fantastic, some imaginative, some basedon their understanding of other adult’s lives and some based on storybook and movierole-models.

Most of the children acknowledged that ’grown up’ involved a time where thingschange or are different because of the passing of time. For one child being older meantpossessing the strength to conquer old monsters and characters (interview five, male, fouryears and five months). For all, it was a time in which they would be able to exert controlover whatever scenario came to hand. Whether it was mooring a boat, driving parentsin a car, understanding concepts at school that are too difficult to understand now, orlooking after people and inventing new medical devices, the future was positively inter-preted by the children as a time in which ideas can be put into action. It was obviousfrom the expressions that the children felt positively connected to the world outside sinceit could still be, in some way, their world. The boundaries of what is immediate andpersonally relevant and what is remote and abstract have not yet been drawn for thesechildren.

It was also interesting to note the children’s familiarity with wider social concerns.The children were familiar with the issues of pollution, the environment, contemporarymusic and warfare and they used their knowledge of these issues in new contexts inorder to understand them more fully. The interviews provided the children with anothermeans of testing their knowledge and understandings. They suggest the need for earlychildhood educators to develop strategies to encourage and sustain the children’s examin-ation of such concepts throughout the year in a manner that is accessible, relevant anddevelopmentally appropriate to the children’s individual levels of thinking in this regard.

The children’s responses include visions of the future which, from the adult perspec-tive, may appear idiosyncratic and unrealistic. But to see them this way is to miss theirfundamental significance. The children’s descriptions constitute stages on which they actout their understandings of the future and, most significantly, develop positive feelingsabout their place in the future and their role in its creation. The responses confirm thatthe future cannot be explored with pre-school children in the same manner in whichthey are discussed with older children and adults. Four to five year old children have afundamentally different attitude towards the future and attendant notions of time andchange.

The children of these interviews, nonetheless, have much to teach us, as those qual-ities which futures studies stress as necessary for a positive understanding of the futureare inherent in their makeup. Their flexibility of thought, their positive and constructiveoutlook on life, their sense of the continuity of time, their creativity and imagination andtheir sense of personal connection with the world are all qualities which futures studies

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seeks to instil in individuals. Such perspectives are in direct contrast to those of theirolder counterparts and as such raise some important considerations relating to the devel-opment of attitudes and understandings of time and the future throughout the early child-hood years into adulthood. The challenge thus relates to bringing out and placing valueupon the natural qualities of young children’s thinking on time and the future and linkingthem to extending and encouraging the children’s potential for growth and developmentas indicated in their own words.

Notes and references

1. Wagschal, P. M. and Johnson, L., Children’s Views of the Future: Innocence Almost Lost. Phi Delta kappan,1989, 67(9), 666–689.

2. Wilson, N., The State of the Planet and Young Children’s Minds. In Studying the Future: An IntroductoryReader, ed., R Slaughter. Commission for the Future and the Australian Bicentennial Authority, Can-berra, 1989.

3. Hutchinson, F., Futures consciousness and the School: Explorations of Broad and Narrow Literacies forthe Twenty First Century with Particular Reference to Australian Young People. Ph.D thesis. University ofNew England, Armidale, NSW, 1992.

4. Hicks, D., A Lesson for the Future. Young People’s Hopes and Fears for Tomorrow. Futures, 1996, 28(1),1–13.

5. Ibid.6. Lorenzo, R., Let’s Shape the Future. Milan, Associazione Italiana World Widelife Fund, Settore Educa-

zione, 1989.7. Trommsdorff, G., Future Orientation and Socialisation. International Journal of Psychology, 1993, 18,

381–406.8. Hicks, op cit, reference 4.9. Piaget, J., The Child’s Construction of Reality. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1955.

10. See Withrow, G. J., The Natural Philosophy of Time, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 68–71 for auseful overview of Piaget’s and others’ research on this topic.

11. Fleer, M., From Piaget to Vygotsky: Moving into a New Era of Early Childhood Education. In ChangingFaces: The Early Childhood Profession in Australia, ed., B. Lambert. Australian Early Childhood Associ-ation, Watson, 1992, pp. 134–59.

12. Piaget, op cit, ref. 9, p. 325.13. Ibid, pp. 327 and 334.14. For the importance of these characteristics for the developing sense of time see ibid., pp. 321 and 347.15. Winthrow, cites Wallis, 1996, op cit, ref. 10, p. 68.16. Green, H. B., Temporal Stages in the Development of Self, In The Study of Time II, eds. J. T. Fraser and

N. Lawrence. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1975.17. Toffler, A., The Psychology of the Future, In Learning for Tomorrow: The Role of the Future in Education,

ed. A. Toffler Random House, New York, 1974.18. Green, op cit, ref. 16, p. 6.19. Masini also stresses the importance of listening to children in the educational context (Masini, E. B. Recon-

ceptualizing Futures: A Need and a Hope. World Future Society Bulletin, November–December, 1982,p. 5).

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the four and five year old's understanding of the future: a preliminary study

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