A LOOK AT HOW USING A VISUAL TIMER MIGHT BE OF GREAT BENEFIT FOR CHILDREN WHO STRUGGLE WITH TIME-KEEPING AND ORGANIZATION IN OUR BUSY WORLD.

By Yolande LOFTUS BA, LLB

Time does not exist, it’s an illusion, a human construct existing only in our minds to conceptualize change intellectually. There is no past or future, that is if you subscribe to theories by scientists like Carlo Revelli.

For many parents with neurodiverse children, time feels very real. Watching a ticking clock after you’ve sent your child upstairs to brush their teeth, school starting in mere minutes, time ticks away with an urgency of ultra reality. This is something parents with kids on the spectrum bring up time and again, so why do many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem oblivious to time, and what can be done about it?

Executive functioning and time management

“Time blindness” was the term used by Beatrice (Bea)

Moise in her presentation for the Autism Parenting Summit (September 2021). A board-certified cognitive specialist and parenting coach, Bea listed time blindness or the inability to plan for, or keep in mind future events, as a symptom of executive dysfunction.

Research confirmed executive function impairment in ASD in a meta-analysis (Demetriou et al., 2018) while another study (Brenner et al., 2015) emphasized the potential worth of temporal processing as an intermediate trait relevant to multiple neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

No idea of time

An increasing amount of research is highlighting difficulties surrounding transitions and awareness of time in children on the spectrum. A study (Poole et al., 2021) aptly titled: ‘No idea of time’: Parents report differences in autistic children’s behavior relating to time in a mixed-methods study identified three key themes: