Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time,temporality,place and space

Peter Pan, time and temporality

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end. (Barrie, 2004: 5)

The story about Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up, begins with the story about Wendy. We learn about the temporality of childhood as invented and produced. We learn about its disappearance as well, and that the way beings move through the generational order is part of the act of ‘growing up’. But there is not only compliance with the order of things, of growing up; there is also a denial of this order: the denial of development. There is one child, as we learn, who does not grow up. The story further develops the idea that all children actually ‘know’ that they will grow up: their subjectivities are positioned in time in a way which demonstrates that they have accepted the way ontologies of beings occur. Time catches up: the story of ‘growing’, ‘maturing’, ‘evolving’ becomes stronger and stronger. Wendy knew that she would grow up. However, it was not just her, it was all children – they all knew that they would grow up – all except one, the one child – Peter Pan. Wendy was two years old, an age at which adults do not consider a child to be ‘rational’, ‘clever’ or ‘somebody who should be taken seriously’. But Wendy knew. She ran to her mother, with a flower, and the adult gaze on the innocence of the child and her childhood, which adults should protect, penetrate every cell and frame of this image: the adult expressed a fear of time, the need to govern the time of childhood, and stated her wish for the child to stay ‘like this for ever’ – ‘for ever’, until the end of time – always observed, led, loved, taught and supervised. ‘For ever’. The subject of time between Mrs. Darling and two-year-old Wendy is expressed by sculpting this nature/culture relation, with a flower and a material sense of the place, but the language used expresses only the passing wish: ‘please stay like this until the end of time’. While for Mrs. Darling this was a moment of nostalgia, for Wendy this was the moment of growing up. She knew that she would have to grow up. She could not stop thinking about it. She was two years old and she realized right there, in the garden with a flower in her hand, as she was making connections and receiving a comment from an adult, the knowledge about what would happen to her: she would, and she must, grow up. There is a temporality involved in the event of childhood, and childhood is the beginning of the end.

How can this popular culture statement about child development be understood? This notion of child development does not go in stages or follow maturation, critical or sensitive periods, as traditional child development theories state, but instead it focuses on Peter Pan to portray a notion of the denial of development, of that one child who resists the temptation to grow up. The narrator reminds readers that:

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind. (Barrie, 2004: 9)

In other words, adults fail to solve or understand what they have coined as ‘childhood’, and the temporalities of this event remain mysterious. Yet a lot of resources are invested in the act of ‘mapping’, ‘analysing’, ‘diagnosing’ and subsequently ‘correcting’ the child’s mind and childhoods. Instead of drawing and catching a child’s mind, this article analyses the notion of time in the reading of childhood and child development.

Childhoods in Neverland operate under their own rules. When it comes to childhood, it is the boys themselves who enter the discussion of who should be killed and thinned out – and who makes up the rules of growing up. According to Peter Pan, growing up is against the rules: ‘The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out’ (Barrie, 2004: 47). While a time of childhood, as argued in theories of maturation and stages of development, does not exist in Neverland, there is a clear material reminder of time on the island: it is measured by the clock. The adults’ fear of what meaning time might have is very different to the children’s:

‘Smee,’ he [Captain Hook] said huskily, ‘that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ He laughed, but in a hollow way.

‘Some day,’ said Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’

Hook wetted his dry lips. ‘Ay,’ he said, ‘that’s the fear that haunts me.’ (Barrie, 2004: 53–54)

Children, however, perceive and utilize time differently: they do not share the future discourse thinking of Captain Hook, the fear of what will happen when the clock stops ticking. Tick-tock. For Peter Pan and his children’s gang, they understand that time is material and they need to find it, get it and stay close to it – to utilize its importance as the essence of their childhoods:

The day, as if quietly gathering its forces, had been almost uneventful, and now the redskins in their blankets were at their posts above, while, below, the children were having their evening meal; all except Peter, who had gone out to get the time. The way you got the time on the island was to find the crocodile, and then stay near him till the clock struck. (Barrie, 2004: 89)

Every child in Neverland understands how to measure time: ‘It must have been not less than ten o’clock by the crocodile, when he suddenly sat up in his bed, wakened by he knew not what’ (Barrie, 2004: 112).

The child in time

Peter Pan’s story can be examined through many philosophical theories and thinking. In this section, a number of theories and thinkers will be examined to carefully create a ‘crack’ in the narrative of children’s development through the notions of time and temporality. As Bennett (2000: 157) states: ‘Time is a framework we impose that captures succession, change or evolution. Temporality is the actual activity or process of succession and change’. In what has been described as a timeless tale wherein ‘childhood dreams live forever’, the story of Peter Pan can be read as a subversive action to undermine the normalcy of child development. Peter Pan is a child in time. His development is intertwined with the concept of time and conveys a sense of concreteness and definiteness. Yet ‘time’ encapsulates difficulties and dangers. Nonetheless, in Peter Pan’s life in Neverland, time is not an entity which is encountered, or a concept which is perceived in isolation. ‘Time and temporality’ is a formula to designate time in its circumstances: ‘time and eternity’, ‘time and motion’, ‘time and duration’, and ‘time and space’ – these forms of time formulate Peter Pan and his gang’s environment. For children, walking on the island, working and thinking with ideas of ‘time and motion’, places time in the context of productive change, practices and cracks in established ways of thinking about child development.

It illustrates the paradox of the measure and the measured: time may be said to measure motion or motion may be said to measure time. This paradox is inherent in Neverland: the walking, the travels are measured by time, by the ticking clock in the crocodile’s body, and time itself is measured by these walks. As Christensen and O’Brien (2002) argue, when you talk with adults about their childhoods, the concepts of mobility and time become pertinent in their memory-infused narratives – in the freedom to move and explore or the freedom to work with time. Time runs slowly in the mornings and in school, and disappears quickly in the afternoons. Time is a continuity that is divided, paradoxically, into three parts: the past, which is a continuity but no longer exists; the future, which is a continuity but does not yet exist; and the present, the now, the moment, which exists but is discrete. And for children it is the adults who invented and utilized the notion of the clock in daily events, institutions and children’s lives, to segregate, measure and define their childhoods.

In Lacan’s (1968) thinking, the ego develops in relation to the other through the process of time. The other in this sense is an adult in the child–adult binary. However, the children stay children in Neverland, and their childhoods last forever. There is a perpetual motion of time, just as the clock is ticking in the crocodile. Tick-tock. Kundera (1999), a scholar of Nietzsche, argues that ‘einmal ist keinmal’ – whatever happens once may equally not have happened at all. Childhood happens once in everyone’s life, and adults tend to look back at it, see it, feel it, think about it and dream it as ‘other’, as a distant notion that no longer belongs to them. The curious case of Peter Pan is different. His childhood lasts forever: Peter Pan embodies perpetual childhood.

Language, thought, discourse and speech are of critical importance in understanding and analysing the ways that subjectivities are formed through cultural norms in these perpetual childhoods. Time, such as the concept of time in Neverland, becomes one of these cultural forms. Time shapes identity formation: Peter Pan engages actively in his development and suppresses development in time. This involves a development and understanding of the self in relation to a number of external elements. Peter Pan’s identity is formed and constituted by Neverland’s socially constructed ideologies and norms, in which all human/non-human entities exist and to which all individuals are expected to conform, as an extension of Foucault’s (1980) work on subjective selves and the self-constitution of subjects (Tesar and Arndt, 2016).

The narratives of the boys in Neverland, and the narrative of Wendy, can also be read as another alternative – as a strong story of gender and power. Peter Pan and his Lost Boys who live in Neverland portray a male order of play that becomes disrupted by a girl (Irigaray, 1981). As Butler (2004) argues, it is through this performativity of gender identity, the discourse of boys, that cultural norms become seen as ‘natural’, and the same may be argued for the development of the child. Following Irigaray (1981), the boys – Peter Pan and the gang – become the norm, and the girl – Wendy – is the other: ‘The question of the other has been poorly formulated in the Western tradition, for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than an/other subject’ (Irigaray, 1993: 8). This way, girls and women are regarded as wives, mothers and daughters of someone else (male). Wendy is associated with Peter for the rest of her life; she will live on in a ‘real world’ of child development where she grows up to tell this story. Wendy learnt as a two-year-old that she must grow up, while Peter Pan remains a boy, full of youth and beauty. Thus, the repeating themes of this story are youth, running out of time (impermanence), death and innocence. Through Irigaray’s (1981) analysis of childhood, time and development, we see Peter Pan, and the gang, and their childhood, as they tell the tale of a much wider notion and conceptual social framework of development, based on gender. Through a feminist critique of the narrative, girls are not active characters with agency; they do not participate in the adventures on the island and only maintain their status in relation to Peter Pan, as they are also in conflict with each other over their desirous wishes about him. These theories and philosophies shape and contribute to the cracks in expected notions of childhood development. They normalize discourses and expected outcomes for children through Peter Pan’s denial of development.

Time and space in Never(land)

The discussion of ‘the child in time’ needs also to consider both histories and philosophies of time, and the connectedness of time with space. Space, as explored above, is essential for Peter Pan’s experiences of time in Neverland.

In discourses of histories of time, Benjamin (1999) argues that, in the past, the time of recurring rituals and festivals enabled a connectedness, perseverance and endurance of the past in the present, while in industrial times this has been replaced by a temporality of the clock and calendar, measurement and calculation. It therefore represents work with a human resource, and is replaced by an empty, meaningless succession of homogeneous instances and events. Neverland can perhaps, then, be perceived as a protracted temporality (Ross, 2006). Peter Pan has very limited and very material experiences with time. Peter Pan makes up the time in Neverland, both as an investigation of the landscape and through the cruel aesthetics of the tick-tock crocodile. In Neverland, time is captured in one particular space/place, which determines how childhoods are developed and how children should grow up.

Furthermore, Lefebvre (1974: 95) argues that with ‘modernity time has vanished from social space’, and that in an era that values the economic and political uses of space, time becomes an outcast, a segregated category, exploited and moulded, and fragmented as a means for monetary profit. This profit is measured and referred against colonized time: how much money we spend on childcare in one year; how much profit the early years centre gets per enrolled child/per hour; or what it means to establish a timeline of profit to make the stream of income sustainable. It may mean and be seen as a complex time/outcome-focused Gantt chart. In modernity, while some ‘time’ has vanished from the social space, other ‘time’ has arisen: not free time, but the colonized, hijacked, captured and tortured time that adults have learnt to struggle with and stress about, and which children learn to cherish. Time has become, in Lefebvre’s (1974) terms, subordinated, detached (but not separated) from space. In Neverland, Peter Pan and the gang make up time.

Neverland and Peter Pan thus disrupt the flow that leads to the capital story of life. While the preoccupation with the present and future is a critique of modernity’s consistent (and almost constant) dismissal of the past, things, old products and pedagogies, in such a regime the possibility of history is on the threshold of loss. For example, Auge’s (2003) work on time postulates that in ruins we may experience the passage of time, a temporality that cannot be completely equated with historical time. His emphasis on the temporal dimension of ruins, however, sets out to critique the disappearance of ruins in contemporary culture – not the lack of preservation of ruins, but culture’s current inability to produce ruins. The way we produce and structure our spaces does not allow ruins to develop. Ruins are things of the past (and we are not producing them any more). Ruins are not productive enough of profit; ruins remind us of ‘old times’. As Ross argues:

The presentism of contemporary architecture (its ephemeral and substitutable dimension) and the communicational function of information technologies that seek to dissolve the obstacles of time and space through a logic of instantaneity and transparency are two key instances in which the production of ruins is fundamentally blocked. (Ross, 2006: 85)

In this sense, the temporal productivity of ruins appears substantially jeopardized. But what if it is not ‘time’ but what may be referred to as particular aspects and forms of temporalities that are lost, transformed, enforced and negated? The notion of a ‘loop’ perhaps denotes these ideas about temporality and time, as it extends an action, but only through repetition – the sound of tick-tock in space as the crocodile walks by in Neverland.

The unresolvable problem of development and time

‘The power of the development’, Adorno (2002: 94) argues, ‘is really established only retrospectively, by the long retransition’. The problem of development for Peter Pan is that from a rational humanist perspective of any kind of timing and space, adults cannot imagine children being without supervision, without protection and, most importantly, without a future – and without growing up. The denial of the temporality of childhood is challenging and dangerous, just as Peter Pan denies the idea that, in order to become a child, you must act like one as a self-evident truth. Similarly, there is an argument from theatre studies which sees the clothes that people carry as indicative of the person they become. So, if adults put on the clothes of their own children, they become their children’s age again – not only language, but also clothes are the carriers of cultures and subjectivities. Children are dressed in particular clothes of particular time periods to reflect their time zones and ideologies.

The social and material aspects of the childhood tale of Peter Pan can perhaps only be studied within its unfolding in time, since it is precisely the ‘movement’ from past to future that marks both the historical accumulation and openness towards new ideas of children’s development. In order to capture this, however, adults would need to stop considering ‘moments of developments’ as unique expressions of an individual creative process and locate it within the cultural-historical practice they are part of. In other words, adults would need to focus on a more micro-temporal scale, rather than a universal prediction of childhood developments.

The domains and dimensions in which temporality operates, and is made to operate, at home, in early childhood settings and schools, and in the interaction between these institutions, to create, reproduce and recast generations, are also subjugated and denied through Peter Pan’s story. Thus, Peter Pan uses temporality as a focal point through which to view expectations and practices around childhood at the intersection of home and school, and to show how these operate to construct a generation-based family order through which not only a child, but an ‘early childhood’ child is produced.

Peter Pan operates on the premise of the ‘free wild child’ who decided never to grow up. In many published studies, when researchers interview children about their childhoods, they have associated childhood with home, family and school structures. In the narrative of Peter Pan, he associates his childhood with a constant adventure – fighting pirates and ‘walking’ on an island, with the freedom to lead the childhood that he wishes to experience, in places that he chooses to be. Central to this approach is a view of childhood as a structure that is based not on pre-existing, ‘naturally occurring’ or binary categories of subjects, such as ‘adult’ or ‘child’, but rather on socially constructed generational categories that lie in liminal spaces between childlike and adultlike subjectivities, and negotiations around time. The temporal interconnectedness between the spheres of home and early childhood centres or schools makes time, and the interplay between time and space, critical and relevant. In such an argument, ethical considerations with respect to time economies become important, as they produce very specific social relations that may be seen as neither adultlike nor childlike.

Childhoods in diasporic times and spaces

In a philosophical exploration of time and space, Neverland becomes a diasporic space. Neverland is positioned within, and on, the liminal border space between the ‘home space’ and the ‘early childhood/school space’. Neverland thus becomes a space that designates a field existing between two boundaries, which are continually being crossed and recrossed both discursively and physically, with borders that are always negotiated. These approaches to child development have changed over time. For Bourdieu (1993: 106), ‘the struggle [of children] itself creates the history of the field [childhood]; through the struggle the field [childhood] is given a temporal dimension’.

Perpetuating a particular generational order, Edwards (2002) argues that childhood has become increasingly ‘familialized’ and ‘institutionalized’. ‘Familialization’ refers to the idea that children are legally, spatially, temporally and conceptually appropriated into their families. At the same time, institutionalizing processes have made it increasingly difficult for children to avoid or ‘escape’ such educational and care structures, with the years of compulsory schooling extended and greater enrolment in pre- and post-compulsory developmental and educational activities. In other words, Peter Pan in Neverland reminds us of the denial of development, escaping the structures and presenting us with a productive, constantly in-construction otherness (Arndt, 2016). In this sense, Peter Pan is out of time and place, and so are Wendy and the Lost Boys. And their parents, in the ‘real’ world, are extremely worried about them and want them back in order to protect them, nurture them, care for them, see them through the developmental stages and live with them in their futures, in ‘a real world’, no matter what such a space is, might be or should look like.

In addition to the above thinking, Bakhtin’s (1981) description of the chronotope – or time–place motion or movement from place to place, based on a cultural but not necessarily developmental (meaning psychological and biological) level – is another important philosophical concept that suggests an alternative examination of the denial of child development. Children’s lives in-between time and space question how temporality operates both within and between the structures of early childhood, school and family, and they contribute to the ongoing reconfiguration of the generational relations discussed above. In such instances, time can thus also become a punishment: time for lateness, for failing to complete a task or homework, for lack of effort or for failing to meet other standards of behaviour. Or, time invokes punishment, governed through the notion of lateness, fees, and more time.

Time, temporalities and soundscapes of urban spaces

In the previous section, Neverland was argued to be a diasporic place. There, time is a basic aspect of human/non-human relations and essential to children’s ‘being and becoming’. What Heidegger (1962) called a ‘vulgar notion of time’ is the argument that, no matter what tense is added to time, it can still be measured with mechanisms such as clocks. This describes how all the subjects and more-than-human subjects (and objects) of Neverland rely on the crocodile producing the tick-tock soundscape on the island. Unlike time, temporality is not really measurable with a clock – it is a togetherness of the past, present and future that is incorporated. As Dillon argues:

The past and present are not ontologically discrete categories, but are, rather, complex human constructs. The present is not a quarantined, autonomous thing. What was begun does not end but instead intensifies so that the past and present become indistinguishable. (Dillon, 2013: 42)

The aesthetics of the temporality of places elevates the thinking about the progression of time in places where the notions of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ interlink. Childhoods are threatened by fast food and its consumption, while, on the other hand, there are many discourses concerning the benefits of slow cooking/slow eating. Fast-food consumption is usually associated with living in urban spaces because people who live in cities ‘lack time’ for slow cooking. Children then lack time to experience the notion of a slow life/slow city (Wunderlich, 2013), and often live in the fast lane – for example, in school bus lanes that transport them faster within their urban space. Children thus live in fast cities where everywhere around them – on buildings and on human subjects’ arms, and also often on the walls of their classrooms – there are clocks that time their childhoods. Tick-tock. In Neverland, for Peter Pan and his gang, the experience of time is shared, it is invented and manufactured, and it engages everyone, ‘unlike in the cities where the time becomes a conscious and collective object of concern’ (Wunderlich, 2013: 383). This place-temporality is a distinctive affective quality that defines human/non-human relationships, and is experienced through flows of unique temporal experiences (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). For instance, like in other temporal experiences, the soundscape of an urban space plays a major role in the perception of temporality in Neverland (the crocodile, tick-tock), showing that the overall sensorial experience of place-temporality is rhythmic and resonant (see Lefebvre, 2004), and in polyrhythmic fields of interaction, shaped by repetitive social practices and other events are overlain and harmonize in time and space. Soundscapes can thus uncover very productive spaces for disrupting ideal childhoods and elevate the denial of development in urban fast-city spaces (see Nordstrom et al., 2016).

Soundscapes help to examine why Peter Pan removed himself from the ‘real’ and the ‘adult’ world – perhaps to escape the fast life, fast time, and growing up too fast. He does not stay in the ‘real’ world of fast development, established boundaries and appropriate practices, but, unlike Wendy and others, returns to Neverland. One must wonder what future time is waiting for him, for the boy who denied development and exposed so clearly the glitches and cracks in the developmental frameworks? Or perhaps, as Baucom (2005: 24), argues, ‘[t]ime does not pass, it accumulates’. In Gould’s (1987) Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, temporality is experienced both cyclically (returning) and consecutively (progressing), and Peter Pan experiences the returning. Child development is in the fast lane, and Klapuri (2008: 52) argues that ‘[i]t is characteristic for the modern individual to think of his living and acting as a pursuit of goals that will be realized only in the future’. And that is what Peter Pan denied, and perhaps that is why he really is what Pillow (2015) calls ‘out of time’, striving to the absolute immanence (Agamben, 1999) or, following Brockmeier’s (1995) argument, becoming ‘time’ itself as a category of the mind.

Productive denial of development

‘Measure twice, cut once’ is a saying that refers to precise, correct and outstanding measurement or work, pointing to the predicament that it may take more time to do some things properly or correctly. In Neverland, and for Peter Pan, this is not a concern. His thinking is not occupied with statements such as ‘time windows’ – or with ‘critical and sensitive periods’ of child development, or with pushing children towards ‘crunch time’. Early childhood education has a temporal dimension: it follows the early childhood/school year and progression is based on time, timetables, hours, sessions and mat times. The denial of development could be a very power-disrupting, and therefore liberating and exhilarating, experience for children and their childhoods, as the different theoretical and philosophical frameworks analysed in this article point out, both through time and space. There is something very seductive in the arguments presented above about ‘pause time’, as Wang (2010) refers to in an analysis of ‘pedagogical pause time’.

This article has argued that traditional conceptions of child development can be cracked. In this argument, the theorization of a denial of development produces alternative readings of development and offers a challenge through thinking about time, temporalities and space. Thus, this article has produced a theorization of ‘event’ – as opposed to ‘clock’ – time and, rather, offers a theorization of the temporality of development that is not measured by a biological clock, but by the notion of an event. To paraphrase Lemke (2000), ‘How do all these measured moments add up to become children’s lives?’ Peter Pan had a worry as he refused to return to the normality of the ‘real life’ of the land focused on ‘timing childhoods’: Peter Pan was concerned that they (read the discourse of the ‘real world’) would ‘catch him and make him a man’. In our realities that do not resemble Neverland, what can be gained from the concept of ‘not growing up’ and from the ‘denial of development’, or, to use Nuttall and Thomas’s (2014: 3) argument: ‘If time is both a resource and an ideal, how might we make sense of this?’