Why Does My Child Stutter?

 

There are many reasons why a child begins to stutter:

•Pre-disposing factors (genetics)

•Developmental factors (learning new things)

•Environmental factors (stressful situations, etc.)

You may wonder what you can do to help the situation.  Here are some tips I learned from the very knowledgeable Anne Elsweiler at USU:

•It helps to decrease the rate of speech and length of utterances.

•It helps to reduce the complexity of sentences and the difficulty of words. 

•It helps to give the child more time to respond and make sure family members don’t interrupt or provide negative responses. 

•It helps to slow down a fast-paced schedule.

•Fluency disrupters to avoid:  rapid turn-taking, competition for speech, fast rate of speech, long complex sentences.

•Remember these children are fluent more of the time than they are disfluent!

 

It can be helpful to remember the following points: 

•All people/kids have some disfluent speech.
 •It’s not anything that the parents have done.

•Stuttering is not caused by parental behaviors. 

•Stuttering can be caused by many things. 

•A family history of stuttering indicates a higher risk.

•There are things that can trigger symptoms.

•Increased learning demands can trigger speech problems such as stuttering.

•Developing children have many increased vocabulary, cognitive, physical and social demands which compete for the brain's resources. 

•The preschool years are a time of increased demands in all these areas so that’s why most kids begin to stutter between the ages of 2-4. 

•75-80% of kids recover spontaneously, but for those who may not, early intervention is very beneficial.

•Certain environmental factors or stressful events may also trigger the stuttering if there are pre-disposing factors.

•There may be some differences as far as where the language is processed in the brain which may slow down speech signals and auditory feedback.  This means that language may take more time for those people who stutter. 

 

More tips later on how to help your child practice fluent speech.