Stuttering - Children & Teens

If you notice that your child is beginning to stutter, it is important to seek professional help. You should get in contact with a speech therapist specialised in diagnosing and treating stuttering. 

The speech therapist will tell you whether the condition is part of the normal language growth of your child, or if it is a case of stuttering that needs therapy. This way you get expert answers, quickly, and peace of mind.

Early intervention ensures best therapy results, and helps protect your child from developing anxiety and frustration, and other impediments to the healthy growth of your child's social skills and self confidence.

Consulting a specialist usually goes through the following steps: 

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder that appears most of the time in early childhood. 

It is the most common fluency disorder, it is also called Childhood-Onset Fluency Disorder.

It is more common in boys than girls, and tends to start between the ages of two and five, at a time when speech and language are developing.  

It is characterized by interruptions in the speech fluency and time patterning of speech, such as:

These symptoms are not attributable to any medical condition!

However, these symptoms cause anxiety about speaking, which trigger limitations in communication, social participation, and academic or occupational performance. 

The visible signs of stuttering can differ from one child to another. A child that stutters commonly has difficulty in starting a word. Other common early signs of stuttering are:

Stuttering is exclusively diagnosed by a speech therapist who is trained to assess speech fluency skills and stuttering-related behaviors. 

The speech therapist will make an in-depth analysis of a variety of speech samples produced by the child (e.g. spontaneous speech, narrative, retell). These are collected in the clinical setting, as well as - through videos for example - in the home environment. These samples help determine the severity of the overt manifestations, and document changes in speech fluency over time. 

In addition, the therapist will tap into the cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions to detect if the disorder is negatively impacting their quality of life.

Stuttering is not a cognitive or language disorder, and typically it should not affect your child’s school performance or learning process. 

However, stuttering could negatively affect your child’s confidence and self-esteem. From an academic perspective, this could prevent him from asking questions in class to clarify misunderstood notions. It could also prevent him from answering questions, or simply participating in class. 

In the longer term, this could affect your child’s academic performance if no measures are taken to help him overcome his difficulties. 

Stuttering may make it difficult to communicate with others, which could affect your child’s quality of life and interpersonal relationships. 

In other words, your child may experience negative social interactions at some point in time, which might place him at risk of developing low self-esteem. 

Positive parental support combined with the skillset of an experienced speech language therapist can help your child to improve his self-confidence as a speaker, and learn how to assert himself in society.  

There are no instant miracle cures for stuttering. Yet, medical (evidence based) studies confirm that many treatment approaches used in speech therapy are successful in helping children who stutter: they reduce the frequency of disfluencies in the speech of the children, and most importantly, they help children develop a positive attitude towards themselves as speakers. 

Therapy is however not an overnight process and its length can vary from a few sessions to a year's follow-up, or even more sometimes, depending on the child’s specific case. 

A speech language therapist specialised in the field can help preschool children, school-aged children and adolescents, and young adults make significant progress in their overall communication skills.

Early intervention can reduce the chances that your child will keep stuttering, so it is highly recommended to get an assessment by a speech therapist, and start the treatment as soon as you have doubts. 

Different speech therapy approaches are available to help your child. The key and common element in all the treatment approaches is to include you, your child, maybe some other frequently seen family members, and your child’s teacher. 

Collaboration is necessary to build an appropriate treatment plan! 

The specific treatment will depend on how much your child stutters, how he is reacting to his stuttering, how stuttering is affecting his daily life, what type of reactions he is being exposed to in his environment, and his age. 

Typical treatment might involve the use of indirect strategies, which will include specific adjustments/changes to be done to your child’s environment to make it easier for him to communicate. The treatment can also include direct strategies aiming to help your child improve how he feels about talking and learning, to become more confident in his speaking skills no matter how much stuttering he may still have.   

You are an important part of your child’s treatment and can have an incredibly positive impact on your child’s therapy process. Working together with a speech language therapist who is knowledgeable about stuttering will help your child learn to talk effectively, and most importantly, with confidence. 

Your active involvement in your child’s therapy session is highly recommended and needed. The involvement could be through your presence during therapy sessions or the constant follow up with your child’s therapist to learn tips on how to best support him/her outside of the sessions. 

In general, it is important to provide your child with a calm environment when communicating with him, by reducing time pressure and other stressors. It is recommended to set time aside to talk to your child, praise him whenever convenient and encourage him to talk. In addition, speaking slowly yourself with some frequent pauses will give him time to say what he wants when needed. 

When your child is talking, it is essential to refrain from comments such as “take it easy”, “relax”, “think”, “repeat it”, “slow down”, “breath well”. Instead, maintain eye contact with him and try to control your emotions and your general attitude (e.g. do not show embarrassment). Moreover, do not interrupt him, rather wait patiently until he is finished talking. 

Research has shown that stuttering has biological causes such as a genetic predisposition to speech disfluency. Emotional or psychological problems are not the root causes of stuttering, and hence it is not a mental health diagnosis. 

However, emotional factors often accompany stuttering. For instance, anxiety can make stuttering worse, and this could create a vicious feedback loop in which the child fears stuttering, triggering him to stutter even more.  

At this point in time, there is no evidence to suggest that speaking two languages in the home since birth causes stuttering. The idea that being exposed to two languages causes difficulties in children has been a long-standing myth. However, many studies conducted in the last couple of years have dispelled this myth. 

In fact, childhood may be, for children who stutter,  the best time to learn a second language. 

Several studies have shown that stuttering does not typically occur when singing, talking or playing alone. In fact, stuttering is a combination of physical and physiological factors. It is not always easy to identify the reasons for not stuttering in certain situations. However, one most common reason behind this phenomenon is that when talking alone or playing, you are more relaxed, you don’t think about how people will judge you, and most importantly, you are not interacting with anybody. Stuttering is a fluency disorder that shows while having social interactions.

On the other hand, when it comes to the singing debate, there are a few hypotheses. First, singing occurs in the right side of the brain, while language uses the left. So while singing, you’re no longer using your left brain. Second, in order to sing, you use your vocal cords and mouth differently. This could have a part in why people don't stutter when singing. Third, singing is a different form of communication than speaking. It is a one-way communication, and eliminates the possibility of some challenges such as being interrupted or involved in an unpredictable conversation. 

These explanations might or might not be the reason why we don't stutter in some situations as listed above. The reason could be the combination of the three, or it could even be something else. There is still a lot of research to be done in this field.  

Stuttering affects people of all ages. It is observed most often in children between the ages of 2 and 6 years as they are developing their language skills. Approximately 5% of all children go through a period of stuttering that lasts six months or even more. 

However, 75% of them will recover by late childhood, leaving about 1% with a long-term persistent condition. 

Stuttering has been around for centuries, and throughout history, many famous people have stuttered (e.g. Bruce Willis, Marilyn Monroe, King George VI…).