Stuttering Therapy

Research has shown, that up to 65-75% of the preschool-age and early elementary-age kids who stutter, will recover completely on their own with no treatment!. That does not mean some of these children should not be seen for treatment. Specialized speech therapy may help some young children recover faster. We must be sure that we inform parents of the facts and do scare them into enrolling their preschooler in treatment now or they will be lifelong stutterers by age 5, as some parents have reportedly been told. This is not to say that some children will not become persistent stutterers with or without treatment, but the percentage is small in comparison.

However, it needs to be kept in mind that stuttering therapy can help persistent stuttering in children, teens, and adults, particularly the 25-35% that are not destined to recover over time on their own.

In my answer I would like to explain why we will not teach YOUNG children, with rare exception, to use a repetition or what some refer to as the "bounce." It has come to my attention quite some time ago that we were seeing kids in the 5-9 year-old who were taught “bouncing” over a period time by other clinicians. These children were trying to use easy repetitions with significant struggle and tension, with virtually no positive result. They were stuttering more severely than when they first started stuttering, according to parent reports. I began to suspect I might be seeing the result of past therapy, wherein, they were taught as a very young child to repeat sounds over and over again.

This logic came from what we now know about brain malleability and plasticity in young children. Specifically, the reason why we want to treat stuttering when children are very young relates to the fact that we feel they can adopt new patterns of speech to a much greater degree than those who have stuttered for years, such as teens and adults. We often state that this is possible because the brain is much more amenable to change, and the adoption of patterns that can possibly replace stuttering before the stuttering becomes more engrained or hard-wired. Well, if this is the case, why can't they adopt repetitive behavior that they are taught as a new speech pattern that could become engrained over time, just like we hope, for example, easy onsets will?

I have spoken to some of my colleagues who also specialize in the research and treatment of stuttering about my concern, people who I have great respect for, who typically will not teach the repetitions or bounces to young children for the same reason related to my concern.

That's not to say that we should not feel comfortable putting some easy repetitions in our speech...as a way to show "it's okay to be bumpy because everyone is sometimes." Or that's not to say we should not model some repetitions for younger kids as a way of identifying easy versus hard speech. However, this is very different from teaching bouncing as an expected technique for a child to use consistently.

Of course there are children who exhibit more persistent stuttering, who repeat, etc., who have not been taught repetitions, so I'm not implying that every child we see exhibits such behaviors because a clinician taught them to do so. However, I've seen a good number of such kids who are now persistent stutterers who have been "therapeutized" in this manner, and who exhibit a type of repetition that is somewhat different from children exhibiting repetitions who have not been taught to do so.

Teaching easy onsets is great, that's something the profession has supported for at least 50 years. However, what the research reveals about brain malleability in young children, coupled with logic, and my observation, causes me concern over teaching repetitions as a therapy technique to young children who stutter.