Stuttering - Boise,ID

I want to recommend that you ask your ped to refer you to a speech pathologist who works with stutterers. He needs an evaluation. Your health insurance should pay for this eval.

You might wonder why you would get a private evaluation. Your child will need an IEP that includes speech services. The school has to go by private eval recommendations. The school's speech therapist would probably actually appreciate having a private evaluation to go by, to be honest.

I am not going to sit here and tell you that all private speech therapists are better than school therapists. However, for more difficult cases, a private therapist who has experience can be make far more difference than just a speech therapist who mostly deals with articulation issues.

My son had both private and school therapy. I will tell you point blank that my son would not have normal speech today (he's 19) if he had only used a school therapist. He had some specialized issues that not every speech therapist encounters. And not every speech therapist encounters stuttering. I moved heaven and earth to get my son help, going through my health insurance, fighting with my insurance company at some points, etc. AND I supplemented with school speech therapy.

Maybe this isn't what you want to hear. Maybe you are hoping that you only have to work through the school. I don't believe that you will get all the help you need like this. Please, get a private evaluation. Your ped can help you find someone. Or, if there is a children's hospital in your area, call them up and ask them to recommend one of their speech therapists who deals with stutterers to do an eval.

Same problem with my oldest! She started doing that in second grade for a time, so we had her start reading books aloud right before bed. She did it most often with particular words or when she started to get nervous. I think it was just a coping mechanism more or less. Anyways, after about 4-5 months of reading out loud we noticed huge improvements :) Hope that helps!

So many thoughts, I have to list them.
1. Good for you getting him to services for his articulation.
2. Wait to talk to the school's speech/language pathologist. Make sure this is the person he is receiving services from, not an assistant. Assistants are wonderful, but for now, a licensed SLP would be more appropriate.
3. Try to notice when he is experiencing most of his stuttering. Is it when he has a long, complex thought to express? Is is when he is risking being interupted by a quicker speaker? Is it just before dinner, when he is too tired to match his thoughts to his rate of speech? These clues will help you when you speak to his speech/language pathologist.
4. You can set up an immediately helpful environment by monitoring his environment for now. Keep things to a schedule (waking up, dinner, bedtime). Don't allow anyone to complete his thoughts. Slow down your own speech, as that sets the pace. Try to keep your own conversation to shorter sentences (especially if you happen to speak in quick paragraphs as I do!). This environment will relieve much pressure for this time in his life.
5. Typically, stuttering at this age is not even called stuttering, but rather, in his case, just repititions. It is usual that children's thoughts and vocabulary can be a bit more advanced than their ability to organize and express them, so they pause by repitition to give themselves time.

All my best.

Actually stuttering is common and usually short lived. I would not put emphasis on it. Hopefully one day he will wake up and it will have stopped. They have so much to say and it seems to get caught up on the way out. Give him some time.

My son,at age 7,started stuttering all of a sudden. It lasted about 6 months and would alternate between getting worse and better. His speech therapist (he has similar issues to what you described), teacher and pediatrician all said the same thing- ignore it. They said if we called attention to it, it would get worse. Chances are it was caused by stress. Eventually it did go away during the summer and hasn't re-emerged since. The speech therapist said she only addresses stuttering if it is causing the child extreme emotional distress and there really isn't much she can do for it. So wait it out.

A lot of kids stutter temporarily while they are figuring out language skills. Dont take it too seriously. Give it time. Both of my sons did it around age 4 for several months... I didnt act on it or treat them any different because of it, and it miraculously disappeared. I hope you have the same blessing. Dont bring it to your childs attention--- let's not make mountains out of mole hills.