Abstract
The five-to-fifteen (FTF) questionnaire is a screening tool completed by parents that is able to distinguish developmental disorders in children aged 5 to 15 years old. The current study aimed to characterize the developmental difficulties by gender and school age (kindergarten and first grade) of children in their transition to primary school, using the Spanish-language version of the FTF questionnaire. The participants were 541 parents of typically developed children from kindergarten and first grade in public schools in Chile. Developmental difficulties were revealed, showing that boys displayed significantly more difficulties in their social skills when compared to girls, and that kindergartners displayed significantly more developmental difficulties than first graders. The children’s developmental difficulties in executive functions, social skills, and emotional/behavioral problems exhibited interactions between gender and school age. The findings were discussed in terms of current conceptualizations of both executive functions and self-regulatory processes. These processes and functions are configured early in development, are gradually consolidated over the course of school age, and can be strengthened or weakened by conditions experienced in childhood. Early screening of developmental difficulties from the parents’ perspective would facilitate early detection of problems, as early as in kindergarten, and considering the normal adaptable development of children.
Highlights
The early detection and diagnosis of developmental difficulties in early childhood has led to better prognoses when they are linked to early interventions [1,2]
We decided to further analyze how developmental difficulties presented in different school ages interact with gender, and how this effect was depicted by the FTF questionnaire’s domains in a non-clinical sample
This study had an incremental character, because it aimed to characterize the interaction between gender and school age
Summary
The early detection and diagnosis of developmental difficulties in early childhood has led to better prognoses when they are linked to early interventions [1,2]. The FTF questionnaire is one of the screening instruments to use parents’ reports to aid in the screening of developmental problems, with clinical samples, and with characterizing specific behavioural patterns in typically developing children [4]. In terms of the capacity of this instrument to detect developmental difficulties by gender and age, several studies have reported that the FTF questionnaire behaves differently between groups [4,12]. 7-year old children combined, in perception, memory, and language [15] This decline in developmental difficulties has been reported in other studies including a wider age range, i.e., Kadesjö, Janols [4] and Beltrán-Ortiz, Todd De Barra [17]. It is possible that certain cognitive mechanisms underlying the adaptation process are interacting differently in school settings, depending on the gender of the children [25]
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