Parents do not often notice a developmental delay until the second year of a child's life, or experts in similar fields calm them down and convince them to wait until the child turns three or even five. Ideally, children should be taken to a speech therapist before they turn two years old.

The indicator of whether a child may or may not have developmental delay is not only whether the child speaks or not.

When a child comes for a developmental and speech assessment, what is important for the child's development is to have contact with other people, whether there is a reciprocal interaction with people who try to animate the child, the way the child plays, if the child follows through with commands, the relationship with other children and with parents.

Going to the speech therapist should not be delayed in the following cases:

When a two-year-old child screams and withdraws during stimulation and play.

The child does not keep his/her eye contact, while playing likes to play alone, without involving other people.

The child does not ask for things with a gesture (if he/she does not speak yet), but grabs them instead.

When the child does not respond to his/her name, sometimes the parents think that he/she is not listening. They often say: "It's like he/she hears me, but he/she doesn't listen".

The child gets into conflicts and reacts violently to requests. This happens because the child does not understand what is being asked of him/her. In another situation, known to the child, the child will carry out that request - not because he/she understood it, but because the child connected the order with the given situation (for example, the order: "Bring your shoes and let's go outside" will be executed, but in case of different orders, "Bring your shoes and put in the closet!" or  "Put the shoes in the closet!", the child will again bring the shoes to go out or will not do anything.

When a child is "clumsy", motorically clumsy, and has uncoordinated movements. The child started holding up his/her head, sitting or walking later.

When the child was born as "high-risk infants". This includes newborns with a low Apgar score, who were born blue, who received oxygen, were in an incubator, had physiological jaundice, when there is a suspicion of hearing impairment, hypotonic or hypertonic children (with reduced or increased muscle tone), children with cerebral palsy, clefts or various syndromes.