Ming (Agents of Speech) addresses parental concerns about very young children (e.g., 18-month-olds) who are not yet talking. He emphasizes diagnostic uncertainty — clinicians cannot reliably determine whether a delay indicates autism or a transient lag at this age — and frames the clinician’s role as mitigating future risk by recommending early language-development strategies and, when appropriate, speech therapy.
A lot of parents will ask me what if my 18 month old child isn't talking yet? Is it speech delay? Is it autism? Is it whatever, right? This is typically a very difficult question to answer. The reason behind is because there's a lot of risk involved, meaning we don't know what's going to happen in six months. Maybe your child's going to talk, maybe he or she will keep on not talking and not interacting and stuff. We really don't know. And this comes down to mitigating risk and thinking about what would happen in the future. And anyone who knows is just blatantly lying to you. They say oh this kid should be on the spectrum or whatever. You really don't know at this point in time and a lot of us speech therapists do is to mitigate that risk at a younger age when we see it say parents, listen up, you got to do these things to help develop the language a little more and you'll see a lot of these tips.
