Having Children May Make the Years Seem to Pass More Quickly

The impression that our lives speed up as we get older is so widespread that it has become conventional wisdom. I have written about my study results from 2005 in a previous Psychology Today blog post, where we found in 500 Austrians and Germans who answered the question “How fast did the last 10 years pass for you?” an age-dependent increase in the subjective feeling of the passage of time. This quickening of subjective lifetime with increasing age was visible from teenagers up to adults, in the age group between 14 and 59. No further speeding up of subjective time occurred for older people. It seems that a plateau is reached at the age of 60. This result has meanwhile been replicated with people from the Netherlands and New Zealand, as well as with Japanese participants.

The standard explanation for this age effect in time perception is related to autobiographical memory. When we look back on our lives, we rely on memory to judge duration. The more interesting and emotional events have been stored in memory during a given time interval, the longer that period of time is felt to have lasted when looking back. As we get older, we experience increasingly more routine in our lives, and the lack of novelty leads to a decline in the amount of exciting events stored in memory. A study from Israel has shown that more routine in life, both in vacation and at work, leads to a faster perceived passage of time.

The increasing amount of routine activities, which are particularly important to get through everyday tasks with children and give them structure and a feeling of safety, may have a strong influence on autobiographical memory in parents. This might cause subjective time to speed up considerably for adults with children as compared to adults without children. Since no empirical evidence so far has been reported in the research literature regarding this hypothesis, Nathalie Mella from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and I analyzed my old study data from 2005 and wrote an article that has just been published in the journal Timing & Time Perception.

We found clear differences, between adults who have children and adults who do not, in the subjective experience of the passage of the previous 10 years. When comparing the two groups, it became clear that for adults with children, time over the previous 10 years passed subjectively more quickly. This difference was not seen for shorter lifetime intervals of a week, a month, and a year. The effects concerning the previous 10 years were seen only for the age groups between 20 and 59, the age group that is in the child-rearing range, and not for older adults. A small positive correlation between number of children and perceived speed of time was also detected.

The results are clear-cut. However, the interpretation is not. One potential explanation for the difference we found lies in the perception of how quickly children grow. Over 10 years, children go through dramatic changes not only in their physical appearance but also in their cognitive abilities and their status. Experiencing such remarkable changes in a person we live with, while adults change minimally, might lead to the perception of accelerated time. This perceptive bias could help explain why parents think that time has passed more quickly.

An alternative explanation is that parents dedicate a large amount of their time to their children and have less time available for their own interests. The feeling of having less time for themselves might lead to the impression that time has elapsed very quickly since time devoted to their own life was objectively reduced. Lastly, having kids is considered by many as an important step in life, and reflecting on having crossed this threshold in one’s life could have an influence on autobiographical memory. Further studies must investigate more deeply the underlying mechanisms of the parenting effect on subjective time acceleration.