While research in developmental psychology shows that children from a very early age exhibit no significant problems in understanding how everyday events are organized temporally, developmental linguists have proved that children up to the age of six years exhibit very deep problems indeed in expressing the order of events using the temporal expressions before and after. These expressions have traditionally been viewed as the prototypical linguistic expressions denoting temporal order. This apparent contradiction can be dissolved by a closer look at the phenomena before and after are capable of expressing. Analysis of natural language data from a CHILDES corpus reveals that, in contrast to previous assumptions, before and after do not seem to be particularly suitable linguistic means to express the kind of temporal order which developmental psychologists examined, namely, the occurrence of one event following another. Before and after are preferably used to express other kinds of relationships between events, such as PROXIMITY (sketched as 'relative order within a reasonable time span determined by the specific discourse or situation context'). In this concept, intermediate events on the same granularity level might occur, and be expressed linguistically, without interference with the given temporal order. Moreover, before and after in their context typically induce further discourse relations such as CAUSALITY or ENABLEMENT. Further conceptual options for expressing the order of events using before and after or corresponding linguistic expressions are qualitative order irrespective of the absolute times of the events or the situation context, and the explicit mention of reference times. Where immediate succession of events (typically without further semantic connections) is to be expressed, (and) then is preferred. In these cases, no events may be introduced in between without switching to a finer level of granularity.