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This article is based upon a survey of personal recollections of young people born in large families and of their parents. It suggests that the temporal socialization of children within their family may or may not contribute to the acquisition of behavioral dispositions aligned with the expectations of education institutions. It distinguishes between two types of intra-family socialization patterns that are socially differentiated. By observing how their parents act and by acting themselves, the children from upper middle-class families who took part in our survey learn to plan and anticipate activities, and to rationalize the use of their time. By being subjected to explicit rules and predictable, deferred and stable sanctions, they get also used to reflect upon their past actions and to anticipate the future. By contrast, children from lower middle-class families develop a more unpredictable and immediate relationship to time. For this group, more than the first, limitations – and in particular temporal limitations – therefore tend to be vested in their close relatives rather than in rules and objective arrangements. They are also dependent on the context within which the children act. This fosters a tendency to expect these limitations to manifest externally rather than a capacity to anticipate and regulate their own behavior accordingly.