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How old is your child? I only bring up age because the younger they are the better their chances will be to overcome this with assistance from a speech therapist.
Mine's 13 years old and has run the gamut of speech therapists and stuttering clinics and stuttering intensives starting from age 3. It was all pointless. I understand speech therapy helps other kids with fluency issues. Not mine. But, good news is I don't notice it very much anymore. Seems worse when he is tired. He does not have blocks, but has the repetitive sounds -bbbbbball.
Mine's 13 years old and has run the gamut of speech therapists and stuttering clinics and stuttering intensives starting from age 3. It was all pointless. I understand speech therapy helps other kids with fluency issues. Not mine. But, good news is I don't notice it very much anymore. Seems worse when he is tired. He does not have blocks, but has the repetitive sounds -bbbbbball.
This could likely be related to anxiety since he is older. I was a therapist for a teenager with stuttering problem and we focused on his anxiety. This helped a lot.
My son stuttered a great deal when he was 5 and 6 years old. I was very concerned about this. I read up on it and found it was somewhat common in boys of this age. I decided to hold off on speech therapy. Our family never brought up the stuttering issue to him (even at times when it was hard for him to get a sentence out) and we asked friends and teachers to do the same.
My son had a classmate who also stuttered (but I think not as badly as my son did). This boy's parents sent him to speech therapy and were always interrupting him to try to get him to focus on not stuttering.
My point is this.... 3 years later my son does not stutter. In fact, he is a wonderfully confident communicator. His friend's stuttering is now much worse and he is having major academic and social issues. I am not a speech therapist. What worked for us was that we were patient and never drew attention to his stuttering.
Stuttering runs in my husbands family. My father in law stuttered as a child and it went away but his children, no.. they needed the help.
My husband stuttered till the age of 18. He was cured using ear phones where he could listen to him speak called bio feedback, today he is 42. My brother in law had the same therapies but they did not work and he still stutters to this day, he is 35.
I was told that this could happen to my son and I watched and listened and sure enough it did.. my husband was very set on seeing only therapists who are experts in the field of stuttering~ why? Because there are children who never respond to a regular speech pathlogist and they know that a person who doesn't have an expertise in it could do more damage than good. Which both my husband and brother in law will tell you that this was the case for them. Very well meaning people but nothing successful for them due to the stuttering being a rare disfluency that has lifetime effects... so many mysteries as well... some say anxiety starts it, some say genetics some a combinations.. I beleive that it is genetics foremost with anxiety blended in for some...
There are only 1% of the population in the United States that stutter and around 300 therapist in the US who have their expertise in it. Boys who come from families who have people who stutter have a 6 times greater chance of stuttering and the longer it is not dealt with, the harder it will to overcome or maybe not at all.
My son, actually last year started to stutter at age 5. It was brought on by going to pick up my daughter from school on a snow day... There was an incident where a woman came up to my window and asked me to pull my car out of the pick up line so she could park in an adjacet space.. she then told me to NEVER BLOCK PARKING SPOTS AGAIN... I saw her eyes and knew she was mad at me and I was flabbergasted because I was in a pick up line and was told that no one was to park there when it was pick up time... that the line was first... We went home and my son started to stutter.. I never once mentioned what happened and he said out of the blue, " That ladddy was (silent) not nice. " I don't blame this woman for causing my son to stutter. Something would have eventually started it, possibly.. it though will remain etched in my memory because of the nature of what happened and how it was the first time he stuttered... I remember just trying to remain calm in the car although I wanted to tell her what I was told but I saw the look in her eyes... I had a son in the car.. I kept thinking of him and too I didn't want to start anything.
I asked his pre school teacher later if she noticed a few things.. she said not really, just a few stammers here or there but nothing alarming. I though wanted to be on top of it and got him the help he needed as fast as I could. I noticed it soon became more and more pronounced as his talking developed with a much larger vocabulary.
He went to a stuttering expert from January to June and he soared.. when the insurance decided to not pay after they pre approved us and left us owing 3000K we had to stop. His disfluencies started to get worse after therapy stopped. The insurance was appealed and they paid all but 700 dollars which I am not too happy.. they should have paid what they said... we were paying 40 dollars a week... our end of the bargin. '
Next week, our son will be going to another speech pathologist in Allen, Texas.. we don't know who he will get.. I though am going to be talking to them.. his stuttering expert he went too can not see him anymore due to only being able to see him on Tuesdays or Thursdays in the mornings. He goes to kindergarten now.
Her words of advice.. go to someone who has had success with people who stutter and if they have not seen any success to not because bad therapy in her words will cause the stuttering to be worse...
I plan on having the pathologist also be in contact with her. She was wonderful..
My hope is that my son will be cured and believe he can one day.. it happened for his dad and why not for him?
Last edited by stargazer; 02-03-2008 at 08:49 PM..
Wow, that's really interesting about that first time he stuttered. My son was a late talker and he stuttered almost immediately when he started putting sentences together. I have one relative who stuttered when she was a child. She was one of those child prodigy type kids and hers stopped between 4th and 5th grade (although she was a couple of years younger than typical 4th and 5th graders).
Have you been to Callier? My son went to their summer stuttering clinic the first year they held it at UTD (he was 5) and it was run by a speech path who was an expert in stuttering. I believe she started to stutter after a car accident and had resolved it and so now she was working in the field. It did not help my child at all but it did help quite a few of the other kids. It was 54 hours of 1 on 1 training over 5 weeks, plus group training.
My son has seen quite a few speech therapists over the years. He just wouldn't buy in. I figured I would just end up getting him one of those things you put in your ear and stops it immediately. But now he is in 7th grade and it's not that significant in his life. He can go weeks without stuttering at all. He never cared that he stuttered, never had self esteem issues, was never made fun of by anyone, never curtailed his talking because of it. I don't think he was typical, but not much about him is typical.
I am so glad you shared your story.. you aren't far from me at all. I am so glad that it hasn't hurt his self esteem.. this is the case for my bil..
Just last week, my son asked me to call the doctor, he said he needed help and it was very serious.. that week was very difficult for him. It is true that a stutterer can go weeks without any disfluencies. My brother in law was telling my husband that the other day he went a long time without any disfluencies and then for 2 weeks straight had a hard time...
My son too, he didn't talk too much... I kept asking the pediatrician and they said that boys don't speak as well as girls do at first.. you see my daughter started making sentences at 17 months and by the time she was 2 you could carry on full conversations with her, like she was an adult. He started to talk around 3 but he just didn't like to talk too much... his 5th birthday was in December and the first time he stuttered was just a few weeks after... I asked the stutter expert when we went to see her late January 2007 and she said it develops and can develop as late as 9.
I have called the Callier Center but the expert is not there but over off of Harry Hines for now. I want to try this summer and get him in, I believe she will be back over that way in the summer...
Has he tried bio feedback? This cured my husband and he has been stutter free for 24 years without the use of any devices. We are hoping that we can get this for our son.
Has he tried bio feedback? This cured my husband and he has been stutter free for 24 years without the use of any devices. We are hoping that we can get this for our son.
No, we haven't tried biofeedback. Actually my son's fluency issue is, oh, about 5 or 6 down on his diagnosis priority list. It's just not on my radar screen anymore. If it ever floats to the top of the list, I will have to look at biofeedback. It's just really not that bad anymore and it's hard to imagine it will get bad again (but who knows). The worst years were age 4, 5, 6, 7 and then the improvement showed up. The speech dept gave him the boot a couple of years ago.
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