As my son bounded off the bus after his first day of kindergarten in September, I could hardly wait to hear everything he’d done. New school. New friends. New lunchroom. New teachers. His world had just undergone a massive shift from the four previous years of day care and preschool, and I was eager to hear all about it. But when I asked, “Hi! How was your first day!?” my typically motormouthed child was silent. His eyes went big. He looked away. Not even a “good,” or “fine,” was uttered. The same thing happened the next day. And the day after that.
I was bereft. Suddenly I felt guilty for all the times I had gently mocked the day care app that sent me updates all day long about what he ate, what art project he was doing, even when his diaper was changed. Those updates, along with the few sometimes blurry daily photos of him on the playground or at circle time, had in retrospect offered me so much solace during the days when I wasn’t close to him. He was alive. He was being taken care of. He was even smiling, sometimes. Now, in a total void of information, I felt like I was suddenly gasping for air. I had no idea what was going on at school. I worried. Was he getting lost? Was he making friends? Was he listening to his teachers? Was he eating his lunch? Was he happy?
As it turns out, the shirking of a question like “How was your day?,” for young children at least, isn’t likely about some need for privacy or newfound independence. Instead, the blank stare can be explained by the fact that the question is the wrong one for young children’s brains to try to process.
“The word ‘day’ is kind of an elusive concept for young kids,” Judith Hudson, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who has studied children’s understanding of time, told me. “The thing about time is that the only way you learn about it is through language.” This is unlike the way a child makes the leap that connects, say, the word “banana” to the curvy yellow fruit—a connection that a child learns through seeing the object and hearing the name again and again. Time words are more nebulous. So even though kids might use the word “day,” or even “yesterday” or “tomorrow,” at around age 5, they likely still only have vague ideas about what those terms all mean to adults. This is why young children often use terms like “tomorrow” to mean any time in the future, i.e., “Tomorrow, when I’m grown up.” Or as my son used to do, they may use “yesterday” to mean anything from that morning before their nap to the trip they took the summer prior.
Even after the concept of a “day” firms up, however, the question could just be too big, says Hudson. “Cognitively, what’s the retrieval process like? If they really take this seriously, they have to mentally go back to the beginning and check off each of those things from their day.” And that’s a slog for the brain. Do they think about waking up? About eating breakfast? About brushing their teeth? Walking to the bus stop? There are so many components to every day that sifting through them takes a lot of time and energy.
And depending on their age, a child might not even be going back through those events in order of when they happened. Zoltán Nádasdy, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, has researched the differences in the ways adults and young children actually measure time—and he’s found a distinct divergence. For all humans, the concept of time is an elusive one. That’s because “we don’t have a sensory organ specialized for measuring durations,” Nádasdy told me. “So we have to make a proxy, something that is not exactly time, but something that correlates with time.”
For adults, that means looking at the clock, or the calendar, or your phone. But for kids, before those tools can really be utilized, they use a different proxy to determine the length of time something takes.
In a study Nádasdy and colleagues published earlier this year in Nature, they asked groups of young children (ages 4 and 5), older children (ages 9 and 10), and adults to recount whether an action-packed movie clip or a boring movie clip was longer. Young children almost unanimously said the action-packed clip was longer, while the adults almost unanimously said the boring clip was longer. From this, the researchers surmised that the way that kids decide that events are long or short is based on how much they can talk about them. Which works out pretty well for them, Nádasdy says. “Usually, things that they can talk more about are longer. But it’s not always true, of course.”
Then, the experiment showed that sometime between the ages of 4 and 10, these answers start to flip. Nádasdy says part of this is because the schedules and clocks that we rely on become a more integral part of these children’s days, so that an outside concept of absolute time, like adults have, clicks into place, but it also seems that the way their brains are actually measuring time changes. Before the flip occurs, a kid’s memory is more like a bucket. “There was playtime, there was eating, I fell on the street. These things are jam-packed in a bucket, not really in terms of sequence, but in terms of relevance to the kid,” he told me. But for most adults, our brains “see” time as a timeline: It’s more organized and even timestamped. So when you ask your kindergartner how their day was, if they answer at all, they’re likely just pulling a random piece from the bucket, or are unsure how to categorize the things in the bucket according to your question. Hence why a memory of something that happened weeks ago might pop up in conversation when you thought you were discussing their day.
So should we just leave our kids alone and let them have their school days for themselves? Not really, says Hudson. Because learning how to remember and process and relay information, and even learn the definitions of things like “day” and how to timestamp and recount our memories, happens through practice. In her more than 30 years of research on children’s memory development, Hudson has found that when parents are involved in asking children to reminisce and share memories together, “it does make a difference in the long run … those kids actually are better at recalling autobiographical memories and reporting them later on.”
Of course, daily remembering can be hard. As kids get older, their brains start to take on some of the same qualities of memory we adults experience. Our brains tend to file routine things away as unexceptional, and essentially not worth remembering, to make room for other things. So a school day might start to seem repetitive and not worth remembering unless we practice pulling out parts each day. And children are usually tired at the end of their day! Like us, they often want to move on to something new after spending hours in one place.
Hudson says using different cue questions can be a helpful place to jumpstart those conversations. So instead of asking about the whole day, try a specific question that could jog a memory, pulling it from the bucket of the daily routine, like “Did you go down the slide at recess?” or a comment like “I noticed there were turkey decorations in your classroom.”
The timing of these questions is also important. Wait a while until children have had some time to decompress from their day before asking direct questions. The dinner table can be a good place to build remembering and sharing into your routine, Hudson told me, because it gives some space after the work and school day to recover before our brains dive back into the fray.
Plus, at dinner, there’s no one person on the spot—you can ask everyone who’s there to participate in more of a family sharing exercise, as opposed to the third-degree interrogation that can cause kids to clam up even more. When you share something that happened in your day, that can also show your child how it works, or trigger a memory for them. “I went for a run today, and I was so tired after,” might remind them of something they did on the playground or at gym class. Or “I met a new person at my job today” might goad them into telling you about a new friend.
Ultimately, there are no foolproof tricks to getting to know every detail of our children’s daily happenings. But be patient, Hudson says. “Accept that if they don’t want to talk, then they don’t want to talk, but you can share your memories, or talk to them about something you noticed that day, and just see what happens.”
