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Helpful Strategies for Communicating with a Young Child who Stutters

3/11/2016

2 Comments

 
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The following are tips for enhancing your child’s fluency and promoting healthy communication attitudes and enjoyment for speaking:

  • Reduce the overall pace of your interaction with your child.  Do this by slowing your rate of speech and adding pauses within your sentences at natural breaks within a sentence, between your sentences and after your child finishes their thought.  
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  • Follow your child’s lead in play in order to match the pace of their interaction, reduce language demands and promote creativity and development of problem-solving skills.
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  • Balance how often you ask your child questions (ex. What did you eat for lunch?) with comments (ex. “I ate a turkey sandwich.”) to reduce the demands of rapid-fire questioning.  You can also use indirect requests such as “I wonder” Or “I think” to initiate a conversation.  
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  • Identify how many words your child typically strings together and speak at a level that is at or slightly above their level.  This will model the length and complexity of sentences where your child can be most successful.  

  • Keep eye contact when your child is speaking and repeat/rephrase both fluent and disfluent speech to show that you are listening and to provide a strong language model.  

  • Help your family members take turns talking to reduce interruptions and prevent them from completing each other’s sentences. 

  • Speak openly about stuttering, just as you would speak about other challenges your child may face.  Acknowledge difficult speaking moments, validate your child’s feelings about their speech and praise them for successfully communicating a message, whether or not they are fluent.  
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  • Build your child’s self-esteem by commenting on the “good stuff” and providing a word to describe their behavior.  An example may be “I noticed you put all the toys back into the container and put it back on the shelf.  That’s what I call helpful!”   

For a PDF version of this blog post, click below: 
Communication Strategies
2 Comments
Tammy Ngo
7/19/2017 08:37:04 pm

Thank you! I am a speech pathology gradue student and these are really helpful tips to give to parents of children who stutter. These are also so of the tips I remember reading about in my textbook by Dr. Barry Guitar. The only one tip I am a little confused about is the tip where it says we should speak at a level slightly above the child's level. I was taught that we should reduce the stress in the child's life and one of the many causes for stuttering is that children can't keep up with the demands and capacity of language that is required of them, that's why they begin to stutter. What are your thoughts on this?

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Brooke Leiman
7/24/2017 10:11:28 am

Hi Tammy!

You are absolutely correct that much of what we do with families of young children who stutter is try to help them to reduce the demands on their child's speech systems. We often speak to children at levels MUCH above their level and when they try to mimic that it can put excessive stress on a their already vulnerable speech system. What I am suggesting is that you listen to the child's language level and try to stay at a level close to theirs, with some leeway for expanding upon what they said. This is a bit overly simplistic but for example if the child states "I want more juice", you can absolutely recast that back to them as "ohhh you want more apple juice" (adding a descriptor). My point is that families are often worried that by speaking at a child at a lower level they are missing out on a critical period to further develop their child's language. However, you can absolutely encourage language development while also keeping the demands low. In fact, all children (including those who don't stutter) often do best when language is expanded on in small increments as opposed to giving a language model that is too high.

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    Brooke Leiman MA, CCC-SLP, BCS-F Director of the Stuttering Clinic at National Therapy Center
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