Written the way you’d actually notice it — at the dinner table, in the parking lot, at pickup — rather than in clinical language. No single item here means anything on its own. Patterns mean something.
Any loss of speech, babbling, or social skills at any age is a reason to call your child’s doctor now, on its own. Skills that appear and then disappear are worth an urgent conversation, not a wait-and-see.
At this age the picture is often subtle, and one item on its own means very little. What clinicians look for is a pattern across several.
This is when routine screening usually happens at well visits, and it's the age the M-CHAT was built for.
A two-year-old with strong receptive understanding but no expressive words still warrants a look — comprehension doesn't rule anything out.
Teachers who see dozens of children this age often notice patterns before parents do. Take that call seriously even if it stings.
Later identification is common, especially for kids who coped well until school demands outgrew their strategies. An older child is not a missed window.
Autism is identified later in girls on average, partly because the picture can look different — intense interests in socially ordinary topics, friendships that are copied rather than felt, and distress that turns inward instead of outward. A quiet, cooperative child who falls apart at home is not a child without a problem.
Some children hold everything together all day by watching other people and copying, then collapse the moment they get in the car. If school says your child is fine and your evenings are unbearable, both can be true — and the second one is the one you should describe to a clinician.
Early and advanced speech doesn’t rule anything out. Plenty of autistic children are highly verbal; the difference shows up in the back-and-forth of conversation, not in vocabulary size.
Then the next step is a phone call, not more reading. We’ll tell you how it works where you live.
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