Child’s Play Therapy Center offers parents the opportunity to learn more about the struggles of children who require therapy services. By educating parents, we take the anxiety of knowing your child needs help and turn it into a positive experience for both of you. Education removes the stigma many parents associate with the types of therapies we offer. We offer several articles here on our site and many more opportunities for education exist for parents with children in our programs.

Featured Article: "Stuttering: My pediatrician says I should just wait and see!"

It can be disconcerting when your young child starts to repeat sounds, syllables or words. Sometimes you will see facial grimacing and obvious struggle behavior. Many pediatricians tell parents to just wait and see if the stuttering will go away. Meanwhile, you become increasingly concerned. Let’s discuss stuttering and what you should know as a parent of a child who is beginning to stutter.

According to the National Stuttering Foundation, stuttering is a communication disorder in which the flow of speech is broken by repetitions (li-li-like this), prolongations (lllllike this), or abnormal stoppages of sounds and syllables. There may also be unusual facial and body movements associated with the effort to speak. Some people refer to stuttering as stammering.

What you may not know is that everyone exhibits some disfluencies or moments of stuttering. No one is able to speak fluently and perfectly all the time. Repeating words or using interjections, such as “um” or “like” are also considered disfluencies. When a person demonstrates disfluencies in more than 5% of their conversational speech, it is usually considered a fluency disorder. The presence of unusual disfluencies like syllable repetitions (li li li like this) or blocking (the abnormal stoppage of sound) is another indicator of a fluency disorder. No one knows what causes stuttering; however it does seem to run in families. According the National Stuttering Foundation, 60% of people who stutter have a relative that also does.

It is common for children to go through periods of disfluency during times of stress or language growth. If these disfluencies persist over several weeks or develop into more noticeable or unusual disfluencies, you should contact a speech therapist to discuss the possibility of a fluency evaluation. A fluency evaluation will educate the speech therapist about your child’s stuttering behaviors and enables the therapist to make recommendations to you the parent. It is always a good idea to have an evaluation to confirm that you are on the right track with your child’s speech needs!

Article written by: Lauren Day, SLP

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