Why We’re Taking the Train to New York Tonight

“We’re taking the train to New York tomorrow and meeting Dad,” I said to Charlie last night, and pointed at the boxes for “Wednesday” and “Thursday” on his picture calendar. “Train to New York,” said Charlie and then, “socks! shoes!” I repeated talking and pointing, adding that it was getting close to bedtime and he was wearing his pajamas; after a few more rounds, Charlie mentioned his teachers’ names and “school tomorrow” and walked off.

When it comes to language both what Charlie hears and what he says seem to be strictly in the present, or to be understood in that way. Mentioning “train to New York” means we’re taking the train right now. I can point to Thursday as “tomorrow” compared to Wednesday, but even the notion of a square with the word “Thursday” on it as being “tomorrow” is a rather abstract notion. When something is said, it exists in the here and now for Charlie, at first thought. He is learning otherwise through a lot of teaching, but his first response seems to be that is what is said is happening right now.

Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence has a post today about children’s cognition and foresight; while the children he mentions are much younger than Charlie (three years old), the points that Chatham makes about children having “an inability to predict and recall events across time more generally” seems to apply to Charlie:

One explanation for this difficulty is that children’s thoughts are dominated by their current states, and they cannot represent alternative contexts that may be distant from those current states.

Chatham also notes children’s “failure to apppropriately perceive and comprehend time”; I would say that Charlie has a difficulty with this (indeed, we have worked on teaching him to wait, with much success).

• We are going into New York tonight because, along with my sister mom-blogger Mothers Vox of Autism’s Edges are reading tonight, April 19th, at 8pm, at Brooklyn Reading Works, at The Old Stone House at Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets.I was asked to read over a year ago and have been looking forward to this for a very long time—-a long wait, indeed.

Our trip will involve a drive to Jersey City, a walk down Kennedy Boulevard to Journal Square, a ride on the PATH train to the World Trade Center station where we will meet Jim, and another subway ride; while I’m at the reading, Jim is planning some walks and subway rides with Charlie. Charlie really enjoys all that traveling and I wonder if one benefit is that all that movement from one place to the next—from the parking lot to Journal Square, from one subway station to the next—is that it provides him with a visual, and a concrete, sense of time, and helps him to “perceive and comprehend” time because he can “see” how much time is passing.

Nothing better than travels with Charlie, if you ask me.