Rethinking temporalities through being with children: A dialogic reflection

Source: PubMed Central Open Access, NCBI / U.S. National Library of Medicine

Children’s everyday lives are shaped by shifting rhythms of movement, suspension, and retrospection through which time becomes lived, imagined, and meaningful. This article brings together interdisciplinary and international perspectives, with members of a collective reflecting on temporality in children’s lives. Across a prologue and nine reflective pieces developed through prolonged dialogue, the article explores time in children’s diverse everyday contexts — including home, school, public, digital, and natural environments — in Canada, Czechia, Finland, and the USA. By applying a temporal lens to projects spanning literacy, ecology, placemaking, and media, the collection conceptualises time as non-linear, plural, situational, and relational. This perspective on time and childhood enables a closer understanding of how children’s experiences unfold within tensions between progress-oriented social expectations, ecological timeframes, and their own ways of being and learning. It also highlights the importance of slow and stretched temporalities for creative, reflective, playful, and imaginative practices. By foregrounding dialogue and deep listening, the article promotes responsive and empathetic approaches to research with children. Developed through collaborative practices grounded in an ethics of care, it also manifests slow childhood scholarship.