Dr. Saoirse Mac Cárthaigh, Educational & Child Psychologist

These are among the most common worries parents carry — often while quietly bracing for bad news. Nearly always, what they describe is ordinary child development doing exactly what it should.
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Seven things parents worry about that psychologists usually don’t:
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1. Counting on fingers. Fingers are the brain’s first number line, and research links using them to stronger number sense (Berteletti & Booth, 2015). Children set them aside on their own.
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2. Not telling the time yet. Reading a clock bundles fractions, counting in fives and spatial reasoning — most children only master it between 5 and 8.
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3. Mixing up left and right. One of the slowest spatial skills there is. About half of 11-year-olds still can’t judge it on a person facing them (Dellatolas et al., 1998).
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4. Needing instructions repeated. Working memory is under construction right through the primary years. Repetition is scaffolding, not failure.
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5. Needing to move while learning. For many children, movement supports attention rather than stealing it. The learning is still landing.
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6. Not lasting a long dinner. Young attention runs in minutes, not courses. A child slipping off early is a child being exactly their age.
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7. Saying ‘I’m bored’. Boredom is the runway for imagination — studies find it nudges children into creative, self-directed play (Mann & Cadman, 2014).
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Every one of these is typical on its own. It’s when several persist together — across home and school, well past the usual ages — that a closer look helps. That’s what an assessment untangles.
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Send this to a parent who’s worrying about the normal.
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Almost no one keeps the screen-time rules for under-fives. Only about 1 in 4 families do — so if that’s not you, you are in very good company.
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Here is what the leading bodies actually advise. Under 2: none at all, bar the odd video call. Ages 2 to 5: up to about an hour a day of good content, watched together. And less is always better. (WHO, 2019; American Academy of Pediatrics.)
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Why so cautious? It’s less about the screen itself and more about what it quietly replaces. Little ones learn language, focus and feelings from back-and-forth moments with you — and one 2024 study linked the average three-year-old’s screen time to around 1,100 fewer words heard a day (Brushe et al., JAMA Pediatrics).
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But here is the honest part: most children land at two to three hours a day, and nearly half of parents reach for a screen just to get through a tantrum. These numbers are an ideal, not a scorecard. So rather than chase perfect, here is what genuinely helps.
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For your child —
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Swap, don’t sn**ch. Keep a boredom box (stickers, playdough, a puzzle) ready, so turning the screen off has an obvious ‘yes’ waiting.
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Guard two windows. If you protect only two, make them mealtimes and the hour before bed — when screens most crowd out talking and sleep.
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Watch together, and make it the telly, not a tablet. A shared screen invites you to watch along and chat about it; a phone or iPad is a solitary world of one.
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For you —
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Your own screen time matters too, because children copy us and our phones quietly cut the conversation. The trick isn’t willpower, it’s friction: delete the worst app, set a 50-character password then log out, switch to greyscale, bury the icon on the last page, and charge the phone in another room.
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Less and better, not perfect. Sometimes the screen is what gets the dinner made — and that’s completely fine. One less hour is a win worth having.
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You ask them to put on their shoes, grab their bag, and wait by the door. Two minutes later they’re standing there with one shoe on and the bag nowhere in sight. Sound familiar?
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Following multi-step instructions is a genuine skill — and a workout for working memory. Your child has to hold each step in mind while doing the last. Like any skill, it grows with practice, and you can fold that practice into the day you already have.
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Way 1 — Run the getting-ready list. Every trip out the door is a ready-made sequence. Give the whole run at once: shoes on, coat on, bag by the door.
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Way 2 — Turn tidy-up into a sequence. Swap a vague ‘tidy up’ for an ordered mission: books first, then blocks, then cars. The room still gets sorted.
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Way 3 — Let them lead the wind-down. Hand them the bedtime routine they know by heart. Ask ‘what’s next?’ instead of telling: pyjamas, teeth, then a story.
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Way 4 — Send them to a treat. Pop a treat in a drawer, then talk them to it with one detailed instruction: ‘Go to the living room, open the third drawer down, and look in the red box.’ They have to hold all three to claim it.
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The golden rule: start small. Two steps, or even one for the littlest, and add the next when they can hold it without a reminder. Every child’s pace is different, and that’s perfectly normal.
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One last trick: before they dash off, ask them to repeat the steps back to you. Saying it out loud locks it in. Keep it light and a little silly — it should feel like a game, never a test.
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Reading an analogue clock is a bigger skill than it looks. Most children get there between the ages of 5 and 8, and it builds slowly — so if it hasn't clicked yet, this post might help.

The good news: you don't need formal lessons. A handful of small habits, woven into everyday life, do most of the work. Five that help:

Give them their own watch. Put an analogue watch on their wrist and give them a reason to check it: 'You can collect your treat at 4 o'clock.' The waiting does the teaching.

Start with the little hand. The hour hand alone tells you most of the time — teach 'it's a bit after 3' long before you tackle minutes. (Hour is the shorter word, and the shorter hand.)

Tie it to their routine. Connect times to things they care about — bath at 7, school at 9 — so the clock starts to mean something.

Past on the right, to on the left. Split the face in two: the right side counts past the hour, the left side counts to the next one.

Catch the clock's trick. As it nears the hour, the little hand creeps up to the next number — so 3:55 can look like it has gone 4, when the hour is still 3. Make a game of spotting it.

Little and often beats a big lesson. Point the time out as you go, keep it light, and let curiosity do the rest.

Know a parent whose child is wrestling with the clock? Send this their way.

We tend to talk about autism, ADHD, intellectual disability and specific learning difficulties as separate boxes. In children, they overlap far more often than chance would predict.

Some rough figures from the research: around 4 in 10 autistic children also have ADHD, and around 3 in 10 also have an intellectual disability (Micai et al., 2023). Around 3 in 10 children with a specific learning difficulty — dyslexia, dyscalculia or dysgraphia — also have ADHD.

Why? These are all neurodevelopmental. They share genes, brain development and underlying differences in attention, memory, processing and regulation. The same wiring simply shows up in different ways.

One distinction worth holding onto: an intellectual disability is global, touching learning and reasoning broadly, while a specific learning difficulty is specific, showing up in particular skills such as reading or maths. They describe different things, so the two rarely sit together.

A note of caution on the numbers. Estimates vary enormously between studies, depending on how each condition is defined and measured — autism and ADHD alone has been reported anywhere from 20% to 60%. Treat these as rough averages, not fixed rates.

The clearest understanding of a child comes from the whole picture: their strengths, how they think and learn, and what helps them thrive. That is what a thorough assessment is for.

New here? Our earlier post on how common each of these is on its own is a good place to start.
Sources: Micai et al. (2023), meta-analysis of conditions co-occurring with autism; Lai et al. (2019); and reviews of ADHD and specific learning difficulties.