South Korea’s autism system is slow long before a child ever reaches a clinic. Training takes time. Parents are unsure which early signals matter. Neighborhood fights over where special-education schools belong can stall services close to home. Professor Cheon Keun-ah, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Yonsei University’s Severance Hospital, works along that entire route.

Start with the pipeline. To practice child and adolescent psychiatry in Korea, physicians complete four years of general psychiatry followed by a two-year fellowship focused on children and teens. Some in the profession have floated an earlier entry point into the fellowship after three years of residency, a structure used in parts of the United States to shorten general training before subspecialization. 

Cheon said any shift would require agreement with adult psychiatry leaders and answers on how to preserve standards. For now, the four-plus-two path stands. Families, meanwhile, try to beat the odds by joining multiple wait lists. Parents “book three or four clinics at once, so outpatient wait lists get longer,” she said.

The front door has shifted, too. Parents increasingly arrive with online checklists and the belief that a single behavior can clinch a diagnosis. Cheon tries to reset expectations. “The most important sign is not lining up toys. It is the absence of social referencing at about 18 months,” she said in an interview with Korea Biomedical Review. 

In uncertain moments, toddlers typically glance at a caregiver’s face for a quick read on safety or permission. When that glance never comes, she looks closer. As for parental responses, “It’s twofold,” she said, describing both minimization and over-interpretation that send the wrong families to the front of a limited line.

To cool the intake, Cheon released a parent guide this spring, paired with short videos. The point is to teach specificity alongside sensitivity, so families can recognize when a worry is unlikely to be autism and stand down. “A careful no can help more than a rushed maybe,” she said. Some parents who waited months for specialty visits later wrote to say their child turned out to be a late talker who caught up. Cheon offers those notes cautiously as evidence that tone and clarity at the first pass can change a child’s path.

Schools face another profile. Strong readers who test well can falter in the ungraded parts of the day. “They keep up academically but struggle with pragmatic language, with context, irony and idioms,” she said. A decade ago, while studying those gaps in brain circuits, Cheon began drafting a tool for teachers and clinicians. The result is the Social Language Test for Children, or C-SLT, a booklet that assesses idiomatic and social-language understanding and doubles as a teaching guide. “Social language and idioms change over time and differ by culture and region, so the tool needs continual revision and updates,” she said.

Her therapy advice stays measured. Music, art and sports can open doors for some children, she said, but they work best as additions to basics such as speech-language therapy, parent coaching and consistent responsive play at home.

The bottleneck is not only clinical. In 2017, parents in Seoul’s Gangseo District knelt in public to ask neighbors to drop their opposition to a special-education school for children with developmental disabilities; the episode sparked a national debate over school siting and stigma, and Seojin School eventually opened after delays. 

More recently, plans for a special-education campus in Seongsu-dong drew organized opposition and contentious council hearings before advancing. Cheon said she would welcome an update to the Korean term for autism, which carries a negative tone. She is clearer about the more durable fix. Make such schools ordinary parts of neighborhoods and families are less likely to hide; services sit closer to daily life. “Terminology matters,” she said. “Public attitudes matter more.”

Her team is also working from the other end of the timeline. With national support she describes as nearing 10 billion won ($7.14 million), they are building a regulated digital medical device for early screening on a three-year clock. The aim is not at-home diagnosis but triage that moves the highest-risk toddlers to specialists sooner and lets anxious families exhale. 

Asked what families should do in the weeks between suspicion and a formal evaluation, Cheon offered a line that doubles as method. “Observe the child holistically,” she said. “Make an integrated judgment, not a decision off one behavior.”