The Preschool Years Show the Same Weak Spot

What the research found

Executive function is a plain idea dressed in clinical language. It is the set of mental skills that let a child hold a goal in mind, resist a distraction, and organise the steps to get something done. In a two-year-old this looks like remembering a two-part instruction. It is the quiet machinery behind almost everything we call “being ready for school”.

This study, published in 2025 in the journal Behavioral Sciences, asked a focused question. Among preschool children who already carry a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, do their executive-function difficulties cluster in a particular place? The author, Esperanza Bausela Herreras of the Public University of Navarra in Spain, drew on ratings for two groups of children aged two to five. A large typically developing sample of 1,979 children provided the normative picture. A smaller clinical sample of 205 children carried diagnoses including autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disorders and communication disorders.

The ratings came from the adults who see these children every day. Parents and teachers completed the BRIEF-P, a preschool questionnaire that turns everyday behaviour into scores across several areas of executive function. There is no puzzle for the child to solve and no clock. An adult simply reports how often the child struggles to wait, to switch tasks, or to keep instructions in mind. Roughly 54 per cent of the ratings came from parents and 46 per cent from teachers.

The clinical and typical groups differed on every measure, and always in the same direction. Three areas stood out. Working memory showed the largest gap between the groups, on both parent ratings (F = 195.76) and teacher ratings (F = 199.63). Close behind sat the Emergent Metacognition Index, which captures the early ability to plan and hold information in mind (parents F = 176.15; teachers F = 187.87). The overall Global Executive score followed the same pattern (parents F = 168.07; teachers F = 207.47). Every one of these differences was statistically significant, meaning it is very unlikely to be a fluke of chance.

Two cautions belong beside those numbers. First, the author reports the practical size of the differences as small-to-moderate. A reliable gap between groups is not the same as a large one, and many individual children will not fit the group average. Second, parents and teachers agreed on the broad shape of the profile but were rating different, unmatched sets of children, so the two views cannot be directly stacked against each other.

What it means for you and your child

The honest headline is narrow. In preschool children who already have a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, the working-memory end of executive function is where the difficulties gather most visibly. That is a useful signpost for where early support might concentrate. It is not a diagnosis, a prediction, or a cause.

Be clear about what this study cannot do. It is what researchers call an ex post facto, cross-sectional design. In plain terms, the author looked back at children who had already been diagnosed and measured them at a single moment. She did not follow them over time and did not run an experiment. The author states this limit herself: the design “imposes restrictions on causal inference”. So the study cannot tell us whether weak working memory helps produce these conditions, results from them, or simply travels alongside them. It describes a pattern. It does not explain it.

The diagnostic mix matters too. The clinical group pooled several very different conditions, and the study does not report firm numbers for each diagnosis separately. So this is a picture of neurodevelopmental difficulty in general, not a portrait of autism, or of ADHD, or of any single condition. A parent cannot read their own child’s diagnosis out of these averages. The groups were also uneven in size, which the author notes may affect the statistical reliability of finer comparisons.

There is also the question of who is doing the rating. A questionnaire completed by an adult measures observed behaviour, filtered through that adult’s expectations and the demands of the setting. It is a reasonable window onto daily life, and the agreement between home and classroom here is reassuring. But it is not the same as watching the child solve a task in a controlled way. Two informants can see the same child differently, and neither view is the whole truth.

What can you reasonably take from this? If a young child has a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, it is sensible to expect that holding information in mind may be genuinely harder for them, and to build in support that lowers that load. That means shorter instructions, one step at a time, visual reminders, and patience with tasks that ask the child to juggle several things at once. These are ordinary, low-risk adjustments that help many children, diagnosis or not.

Finally, treat this as one careful description among many. A single study, however large, is a snapshot from one country, one age band, and one questionnaire. It adds a clear brick to the wall. It does not build the wall on its own. If a specific worry is on your mind, a proper individual assessment will tell you far more about your child than any group average ever can.