Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more ``intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like discourse context. This could explain why children experience more difficulties with pronouns than with reflexives. Using eye-tracking and a truth value judgement task, we investigated the effect of focus via *it*-clefts on the processing of reflexives and pronouns in German-speaking children and adults. We analyzed gaze data of three time segments: before, during and after the mention of the pronoun/reflexive. The cleft segment revealed similar processing of *it*-clefts in children and adults. In the subsequent reflexive/pronoun segment, clefts caused adults to pay overall more attention to the reflexive referent, while children fixated the clefted pronoun referent more. The third segment showed attention shifted to the incorrect referent when visual and linguistic stimuli did not align. The difference in focus effect, i.e., children attend the pronoun referent more, while adults pay more attention to the reflexive referent, helped uncover processing differences between children and adults. That is, unlike adults, children consider only the local discourse context during referential processing. We argue that these processing differences cause children's interpretation difficulties. However, the offline data showed no effect of information structure, suggesting that whether the processing differences transfer to the final interpretation depends on the language-specific function of the pronoun system which may aid in restricting referential links.