•One-step “spoon tests” do not directly assess the ability to reason about the future.•Preschoolers were tested in a two-step “spoon test” that required temporal reasoning.•Only 5-year-olds included temporal reasoning in their planning responses.•It is crucial to incorporate a temporal component to investigate future thinking.•Alone item-choice measures of planning might not involve foresight. Previous methodologies used to investigate future thinking (i.e., one-step “spoon test”) do not directly assess temporal reasoning. Consequently, the extent to which foresight is required to solve these tasks has been questioned. In the current study, 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds were presented with a two-step “spoon test”: to secure a future need (e.g., play with a marble run game), children first had to obtain a key that allowed them next to access the marbles. By the age of 4 children selected the key; however, it is only by the age of 5 that children reasoned about the temporal sequence of future events and selected the key. Temporal reasoning, memory for the past events and age significantly contributed to predict children’s ability to select the correct item. These findings suggest that temporal reasoning is crucial to assess future thinking and that item-choice measures alone might not involve foresight.