childhoodwhen

Childhoodwhen is a neologism used to describe the perceived temporal frame of childhood—the subjective sense of time that characterizes early life. The term covers how children experience duration, how memories of those years are encoded and later recalled, and how cultural and familial rhythms shape the sense of growing up. By asking what constitutes "when" childhood, the coinage emphasizes that childhood time is not only a matter of age but of qualitative experience.

The word blends childhood and when, signaling a focus on temporal perception rather than fixed chronology. It appears in contemporary literary criticism, memory studies, and discussions of autobiographical recall to denote moments when time feels elongated, contracted, or otherwise altered in retrospect. In narrative analysis, a single scene may evoke a "childhoodwhen" moment that stands in for an entire span of years, or can anchor a character’s development within a specific temporal sensibility.

Relation to related concepts includes time perception, nostalgia, autobiographical memory, and developmental psychology. While not an established scientific category, "childhoodwhen" serves as a descriptive shorthand for exploring how youth shapes and is shaped by the experience of time. Its utility depends on clear contextualization within theories of memory, cognition, and culture.