Ming from Agents of Speech breaks down how to tell if your child actually wants to communicate: do they talk to you, comment on things, ask questions, seek help. Kids who chat with adults but clam up around peers might be stuck in an early stage of development.
You need to look at how much your child actually talks to you, how many expressions of communication intention. So do they talk to you? Do they have a limited use of language? Is it only for requesting from you? Do they comment to you? Do they answer your questions? Do they ask questions to you? Do they ask for attention, for clarification when they don't understand something, do they ask for help? All these things are basically telling you how limited or how good their communication skills are. Another thing that you can look for is that are they better at communicating, interacting with adults rather than peers because developmentally speaking we learn to communicate with our parents first and then go out to the world and talk to people of our age. So if your child is better at talking to you adults and not good at interacting with peers and playing with games and putting themselves into the situation and participating, then that's also a risk factor and that's something we might have to work on later on as well.
