Today we're going to talk about how to help a child to stutters. And this is
right up my alley I've got about seven tips that are going
to help you to talk to your child who may be dealing with stuttering.
Obviously, Vicky's a lot more of an expert on this than I am I've worked with some kids who
stutter from the psychological standpoint Vicky our speech-language
pathologist and you've done this professionally for how long now?
Over 20 years I don't know how many. That's why she's here is the expert and you've got
some tips for us on how to help the child who stutters.Yeah, first of all
it's not uncommon for a child to have an episode of stuttering sometime between
the ages of 3 & 7. And that's usually when parents come and ask me like "oh
what am I supposed to do about this?" I like the very first thing I always talk
to parents too about is reducing your pace the how fast you speak yeah we just
have to slow it down. I have to remind myself all the time because I kind of
talk fast. So one of the things you want to do is slow down I tell parents that
if you're slowing it down and you think you've slowed it down go down two more notches.
Because we rarely talk as slow as we kind of need to model for
especially when you're talking about young children who stutter a lot of the
times they're stuttering because neurologically they just haven't
developed enough quick enough are all the way in order to catch up with all
the thoughts going through their head their language hasn't developed and so
they just need a little more time. You know I'm chuckling a little bit over
here because some of you have commented in previous videos that I talk very
slowly and I did I do I've slowed to death I have a voice disorder.
And this is one of the times that I started to do that because I have some disfluencies
that I have to slow down so that I can get it right. And in these videos, I slow
it down for that reason as well as for some of the transcriptions that are
happen in other languages and things like that
just to make it more understandable but I use the word disfluency mm-hmm I
learned that from you. Right you know, everybody is just fluent
at some point like right there you just say the word wrong or you stumble on it
a little or you'll repeat yourself. Stuttering is when those disfluencies
start to interrupt the way you communicate with other people or make
you start to avoid saying things or perhaps changing the way that you're
talking that's when you start talking about stuttering true stuttering.
So slowing it down is probably the first step definitely what's next you wanna
use or employ full listening. This is when you actually give your child full
attention now that doesn't mean that you're doing full attention all the time
like every time they talk whoop here goes my job
oh I've talked to find times that you can give your full attention to them
turn to them get down on their level and just we've talked a lot about this in
parenting about modeling soft face soft look all you want to do that with kids
as well who are stuttering. One of the most fascinating videos I ever saw when
I was in graduate school it was a video taped parents watching a videotape of
their child stuttering and you would see all these they would be going like you
could just see all the things hiding on the parents face watching their job
almost like trying to help them get through the stuttering moment so
sometimes what we need to do is just kind of take a moment take a big breath
and just be fully present with your child so even if it yeah even if you can
just find maybe five minutes a day to have full listening with this child. And
that sort of leads into tip number three. It's natural to ask questions what we do
a lot of the times is we find that we we rapid-fire questions one question two
question did you go to school? how was it? did you talk to your friend? how do how
was it did you play you know yeah it's really and that's really hard for the
child who's stuttering. So you want to kind of limit your questions or after
your questions you're gonna practice posi
when you are asking questions go ahead and introduce wait time and I literally
do this at works times I will ask a question then count
Just give him time to answer give them quite a bit of time then you're really
cueing yourself to just back off and give them the time to process right
Which actually leads really well in to tip number four is turn taking you gotta
make sure that you are taking your turn to talk and then letting your child take
the other turn to talk and you're probably going to have to cue the other
members of your family into this too because they're engaging in habits right
what you have been doing in the past so other kids might be kind of talking over
your child most parents are going to see the in stuttering increase when there's
two or three kids vying for your attention it's like they're trying to
talk faster and louder just so they can get your attention so you're going to
have to model and kind of teach turn-taking. Just from a psychological
standpoint Vicky the tension, the stress, is part of what exacerbates the
disfluency right and so anything that we can do to calm that down and slow it
down and take turns really great points. Calming it down also helps kids to start
gaining confidence and I think that's can we use that as one of the tips? you
bet! do I get to contribute one? So confidence I think helps to counteract
some of that anxiety and tension that's causing the problem to be there anyway
and other activities that you can do to increase confidence we've done other
videos about that but let's throw that in increase their confidence okay tip
number six I love is talking about finding time to have just a special time
with your child my favorite time is reading like one on one brought one on
one and it doesn't even have to be very long one of my first tips I'd tell
parents is read a story to your child every day and read it about almost half
as fast as you normally would and you're modeling both the quiet time the slowed
time but you're also doing one on one time and this is a great opportunity to
just spend that special one-on-one time with your child which will build the
relationship as well yeah and finally normal rules still apply some people
think well if he stutters does that mean I can't discipline him or or I should
make him have to do his chores No treat him like everybody else no special
treatment in fact that might make it worse you know if you try to single them
out as a special case or something right so same expectations yeah so these are
just some tips that can help you dealing with a child who is stuttering if for
some reason your child is getting to the point where they're stuttering more than
ten percent of the time or pretty much every time they're talking or perhaps
they're avoiding situations social situations or changing the way that they
maybe not even say things that they would like to say it's probably time to
seek some professional help and so you might want to reach out to a
pediatrician or you can go on to the American speech and hearing and language
association website and you can find a speech-language pathologist in your area
thanks for joining us today if you want to get more information about this Paul
and I have teamed up on our parenting power up you can get there really easily
with the link right over there or the one down in the description we're so
happy to be on your team
I saw standing in the