Recent research on children's thinking about the future has taken multiple directions, many of which are illustrated in the contributions to this special issue. In this commentary the topic is discussed in the context of research on children's understanding of time, and some of the adaptive challenges of thinking about the future are considered.…

Proposes an account of the development of temporal understanding, linking it with episodic memory development. Distinguishes between ways of representing time in terms of frameworks involved; describes perspectival and nonperspectival frameworks and those representing recurrent sequences or particular times. Describes emergence of new kinds of…