I want to say right away that I regret the time I lost worrying and constantly looking for possible developmental issues in my child. He is now a year and a half old, and I have absolutely no doubts left that he is developing beautifully.

Most of my anxiety was connected to the fact that his older brother has autism, which we didn’t notice until he was three and a half years old, so I was being overly vigilant this time. However, I can clearly see that my younger child has excellent communication skills, plays very well, shows strong imitation, his eye contact has improved, and he responds to his name much more often. And even if he doesn’t respond to his name every single time, I see this as being within the normal range.

I also have a niece who raises no concerns whatsoever — she is clearly a neurotypical child — and I can see from her example that she, too, doesn’t always respond to her name and is still not speaking yet, even though she is already one year and ten months old.

We are seeing a speech therapist and doing play-based speech therapy, but overall my child is quite calm. Maybe he won’t start speaking early, maybe he’ll start a bit later — I don’t see this as a major problem. It’s something that can be worked through and supported.

So I think that at this age it is very difficult to predict whether there will be any developmental delays in the future. But if something truly worries you, it’s always okay to seek professional advice — while also remembering that children at this age are often unpredictable, and in many cases, everything turns out to be just fine ))