Are you at all bothered by the rush of the school day or the pace of our children’s lives? Can children’s brains and bodies accept the media and technology barrage in a healthy way as they merge onto this so-called “superhighway”?

I am writing for and you are reading and responding to a “blog,” something none of us could have imagined when we were children. What is it that our children cannot imagine but that they will be cognitively engaged with in another ten or twenty years?

These questions are always at the forefront of my mind as I watch children on our playground spend a half-hour on the swings, playing a game of soccer or being “The Moth Hunters” as a group of 5th grade girls called themselves last week at recess as they captured and brought me their discoveries.

It was Jean Piaget, the great developmental observer of children, who first wrote about children’s understanding of time in his classic 1927 volume, The Child’s Conception of Time. He made it clear that children do not perceive or experience time the way adults do, but that they live in the present moment, gradually developing an understanding of past, present and future.

We have largely ignored this understanding in the way we organize our school schedules, or busy home and sports schedules for our youngsters. Within the classroom itself, teachers feel enormous pressure to move quickly from one task to another, but this is not the way children are thinking. They are absorbed in the task before them, which is why transitions are often so enormously difficult.

In my 1999 book, Time to Teach, Time to Learn: Changing the Pace of School, I explain many strategies schools can explore to help preserve the joyful concentration of children else they become miniature adults before their time. I also commend to you the current Whole Child movement being forwarded by ASCD to help return some balanced sanity to children’s lives.