For some people, stuttering is a lifelong speech disorder that can interfere with school, social life, career choices and overall self-esteem. But it doesn’t have to. People can learn how to manage stuttering and go about their lives with confidence.
Adult Stuttering
For Jenny Striplin of Santa Clarita, California, the turning point came when she and her then 2-year-old son attended a Mommy-and-Me toddler group. When it was their turn for round-the-circle introductions, Striplin managed to get out her son’s name — but not her own.
Striplin felt other parents around the circle staring. “Everyone kind of looks at me with eyes as big as can be,” she recalls. “It seems like they’re all hoping you can do it, but it’s making them uncomfortable. And you could tell they wished they could do something for you.”
Striplin decided it was time to do something for herself. So she made an appointment with a speech-language pathologist, and asked to try a wearable device that she’d heard helps some people with stuttering. It lets users hear their own voices with a shift in pitch and slight delay, which may increase their fluency. After a trial run with the device gave only temporary improvement, Striplin and her therapist agreed to a long-term treatment plan.
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When growing up, Striplin had never let stuttering stop her, whether participating in local beauty pageants or rushing a sorority as an undergrad. For a long time, she believed that avoiding stuttering was a manner of mechanics. “I thought, ‘I have control of this if I really speak slowly and enunciate,'” she says. “And if I think about what I want to say.”
By graduate school, she thought she’d surmounted stuttering. But in certain stressful periods in adulthood, stuttering resurfaced with a vengeance, making it nearly impossible to speak even to closest family members, forcing her to resort to texts and emails.
So she committed to relearning the basics of speaking with her speech-language pathologist, which helped her realize that stuttering wasn’t her fault: “I truly have a speech disorder. It’s not just my laziness or inability to slow down.” Now she has methods to make her speech more rhythmic, or to get out of a block if she’s stuck on a word. In fact, her speech sounds clear and fluent.
Who Stutters and Why?
At some point, everyone has speaking glitches, or disfluencies. For example, using fillers such as “like” or nonword fillers such as “um” and “uh” are common disfluencies, but not speech disorders .
About 5 percent of people have stuttering as a speech disorder at some point in their lives, according to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, or ASHA. Scientists are investigating possible biological and genetic causes. Brain images have shown some difference in teens and young adults who stutter, but the research isn’t definitive.
Chronic stuttering appears to be likelier for those who have a family history of the disorder, stuttering that lasts longer than six months to a year without improvement, stuttering that starts at age 3-and-a-half or later, and coexisting speech and language issues like language delays. Boys are more likely to stutter than girls.
Repeating partial words, sounds or syllables may indicate a stuttering problem, as do speech blocks, when a person knows what he or she wants to say, but is unable to produce the sound (think: long pauses). People who stutter often struggle with secondary behaviors, also called emotional overlays, such as facial grimaces or head movements, says Diane Paul, director of clinical Issues in speech-language pathology for ASHA.
“When somebody’s having a block and can’t get the sound out, they may do something else like touch their glasses or tense up,” Paul says. “Some people may have more negative reactions to their own stuttering and less confidence in speaking.”
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Early intervention is important. If you suspect your child may have a speech problem, make an appointment with a speech-language pathologist. If stuttering is diagnosed, the therapist will work with you and your child to develop an individualized treatment approach.
With preschoolers, training parents to help their kids is a major facet of treatment, says Roberta Kornfield, a speech-language pathologist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “One of the first things we ask parents is to slow down their speech,” she says. “Maybe to simplify their language; not ask so many questions. So we’re taking a lot of the communicative stress off children.”
Kornfield uses strategies based on the Lidcombe program, a stuttering plan developed in Australia that promotes positive reinforcement for kids when they speak fluently. As a child progresses, parents can begin to address less-fluent speech, Kornfield says, with feedback like: “Hmm; that sounds a little bumpy or sticky,” and encouraging him or her to try again to sound nice and smooth.
With older kids, Kornfield helps them develop fluency-facilitating techniques. For instance, one method, called early-voice onset, involves stretching out the initial sound at the beginning of an utterance. The child starts the sound very quietly then increases volume, so it sounds like a glide. The more kids work on such techniques, first practicing at home and then in real-life situations, the more improvement they’ll see.
When Your Child Stutters
Annemarie Whitesel of Charlotte, North Carolina, witnessed the toll stuttering took on her daughter, Brittany, now 26. “She’s very proud of the fact that she stutters, now,” her mother says. “That was not the case when she was growing up.”
Speech therapy helped, Whitesel says. Brittany learned how to use breathing techniques and other tools. But she still struggled. “Her own name is probably the hardest word for her,” Whitesel says. “The consonant “B” is the most difficult. So just introducing herself to someone new was not something she ever wanted to do.”
Isolation was a problem. “My daughter is someone who, at home, was always very vocal and would struggle through the stuttering,” Whitesel says. “But once she’d leave the house, she would be a completely different person. She never wanted to go anywhere. She didn’t want to go out to eat. She would never talk on the phone. She wouldn’t meet anybody.”
Brittany didn’t want to be treated differently than other students. If she had to give a speech in class, she did it, her mother says, but it was “horrible” for her. “When you’re tired or nervous, that’s the worst time to speak,” Whitesel says. “Your body’s not relaxed and you’re tense and your brain is on overload. So you tend to stutter more. Thankfully, she had teachers who graded her on content, not delivery.”
High school graduation was a tipping point, Whitesel says. Away at college, no longer with familiar teachers and kids, Brittany became isolated and depressed, and her mother was concerned about her well-being. In desperation, she searched online and discovered the National Stuttering Association. (Whitesel is now an NSA board member.)
For mother and daughter alike, traveling to their first chapter meeting was a breakthrough. “Brittany was for the first time in a room with young people and adults her own age” who stuttered, Whitesel says. “She realized, ‘There are people like me.’ When she walked out of there she was almost skipping. It was life-changing for her.”
After a three-year break in which Brittany helped her mother start a local NSA chapter, she returned to college to complete her senior year, this time far more socially engaged and with much more self-confidence. “She had this attitude of, ‘No. 1, I know I’m not the only one who stutters,” Whitesel says. “”And No., 2, it doesn’t define who I am; it’s just something that I do.'”
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You can help someone who stutters by being a good listener. “Give the person time to talk and focus on the message, not how they’re saying something,” Paul says. “Don’t look away. Listen to what somebody’s saying. Don’t finish their sentences.”
Adds Whitesel: “It’s crucial to not break eye contact with that person. To not jump in and assume you know what they’re trying to say. It’s just giving them the respect and the time and the patience to just say what they want to say.”
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How to Help Someone Who Stutters originally appeared on usnews.com
