I am a stutterer. My wife used to be a stutterer. When we noticed our two-year-old began to stutter really badly, we began to worry. With our own histories and with our daughter’s bout of speech delay we did what any parent would do, look up stuttering in toddlers on the Internet and then call a speech therapist to have him evaluated.
My son who has a huge vocabulary had a bit of a stutter as he started putting full sentences together. But when we really noticed it, was when the stutter got really pronounced, and he told us while shopping at Target that he couldn’t say something. That prompted us to call our wonderful and trusted speech-language pathologist, Beth Fine, whose team at Fine Communications performed nothing short of a miracle with our daughter. Ms. Fine was very willing to see our son for an evaluation.
We brought him in for an evaluation, hoping for the best, and fearing the worst. According to The Stuttering Foundation, approximately five percent of all children go through a period of stuttering, and it’s nearly four times as prevalent in boys as it is in girls. The vast majority of childhood stutters recover within a few months. But with the start of nursery school only six months away, we didn’t want to risk delaying getting him the help he might need.
Ms. Fine put him through several exercises – initially with some toys and then eventually going through a book of pictures to identify them. He was just rattling things off. He did the early light stutter which didn’t bother us, but the heavy stutter seemed to be gone. She gave us the best news! It was the normal level of stuttering, a mild form of dysfluency that we shouldn’t worry too much about. She continued to say that since he has so many words in his vocabulary available to him he stumbles over stringing them together into sentences. Ms.Fine gave us some tips to help him…including at least one that contradicted something we read online and had started doing (telling him to slow down). Some of her other suggestions are:
– Speak slowly to your child.
– Look at your child when he/she is speaking.
– Use simple sentences and vocabulary.
– Do not talk about your child’s speech in their presence.
– Do not correct them, just let them talk.
– Try not to be critical and don’t focus on their mistakes.
– Be patient.
So with instructions on how to help our son, and an invitation to bring him for more professional help if he doesn’t progress, we know that he will be ready for Nursery school in the fall.
While an evaluation with a qualified person is ideal, The Stuttering Foundation has a really helpful pamphlet about what is in the normal spectrum of development and what really requires intervention.
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