Speech plays a vital role throughout our lives, helping us to understand what is going on around us, communicate our basic needs and feelings, hold conversations, think and learn, develop relationships and solve problems. Both parents and teachers play a significant role in helping to improve children's language development and outcomes. It's important to recognize potential speech problem and what we can do to support young children's language. Kidz Kollege held an awareness workshop to help identify concerns in speech/ language development and encourage families to seek intervention as soon as possible. Early diagnosis and treatment for developmental delays increases the chances of improvement rather than simply "waiting it out" and treating problems later.

SLP is a growing field. Early intervention is generally very important as it can impact school success. Learning to communicate is quite complicated. The good news is that children are programmed to be able to do it, but they need lots of input from adults to kickstart this process. This also needs to be direct, face-to-face input from a real human being. Children might not develop language skills effectively from TV or computer games, even if they are educational, they need to listen and interact with caring adults - real talk from real people. As a result, the more you talk to a child and support their language, the more progress they will make. The workshop threw light on ways of supporting early language development, looking out for early signs and red flags. Identifying when to refer the child to a speech language pathologist and strategies to support your child at home using practical tools. The session underlined what it is like to be a child with autism and viewing autism through a different lens. Autism as a different ability rather than a disability. Look past what you may see as limitations and see the gifts autism has given.