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ViberChildren stuttering
Reasons
Children’s stuttering (or logoneurosis) is a hurtful speech impediment, which sometimes prevents them from living life to the fullest. According to statistics, stuttering in children is found in 4% of cases. In adults it is 2%. So this defect is quite (and even efficiently) curable.
The development of speech function in children is very complicated. And this is the reason of developing some defects during this process. One of the most frequent defects is stuttering. And it has lots of reasons.
Usually stuttering is developing at an early age. At this stage it is very important for parents to take the necessary steps to treat stuttering in children. If this is not done, a child can have difficulties without being able to get along with other children. This, in turn, can lead to child`s unsociability, deteriorating of the performance, lack of normal good communication, and so on.
To determine the type of stuttering, you need to closely observe the child. If a child has speech difficulties only in stressful, tense situations (being very excited), for example, in front of strangers, so it is a neurotic form of stuttering (acquired). In some cases you may not see any problems with this form of stuttering, in his or her natural environment (within the family). Your child may speak quite normally. If stuttering almost never goes away and it doesn`t depend on the influence of external factors, then the cause of it is most likely the abnormal brain or language centers functioning.
You should remember that the elimination of stuttering may be a long process which requires not only a lot of time spent but also different efforts. You need to be ready for this. Working on speech correction is carried out in a comprehensive manner. But if you have a real desire, if you are daily engaged with your child to cure stuttering, then you and your child will necessarily do it.
Сertainly people use a game form working on elimination of speech defects with children. Thus, the barrier, which prevents a child from the correct pronunciation, is overcoming. Gradually speech acquires its normal tempo and rhythm, and a child gets rid of those forms of stuttering which prevented him from talking calmly
Most often, in about 90% of cases, stuttering in children appears at the age of 5-6. Even at this stage you`d better to retrain a child and make his or her speech better. At an early age, with the correct approach, it is possible to completely eliminate stuttering so that it won`t bother in adult life.
Differences in the treatment of stuttering in children and adults
It is much more difficult to make speech of adults correct calm/not twitchy. And the reason of it is that a man have been dealing with this problem for many years, but he or she didn`t know what to do with it. You should understand that such a man have been growing and developing with stuttering from his very childhood. And in most cases, it could not but leave a negative impact on the development of the personality as a whole. Some children begin to stutter a bit in the lower grades. But then, when the total duration of communication and amount of stressful situations increase, he begins to stutter more and more. There is no any guarantee that this apparently a slight stuttering in a day care will not develop later, in a primary or middle school, in a serious problem with the daily numerous stupors and attempts to make any sounds.
Well, that’s what happened to me. Therefore, no one knows better than I the value of working on stuttering elimination at the earliest stages. This, of course, will only benefit a child, who will be able to speak like all his or her peers. And a child will have the opportunity to develop on equal terms with everyone. Of course, there is a chance that stuttering will go away after a while, but we should face the truth: according to statistics, there’s a one in 100 chance that it can happen. Perhaps speech therapists or psychologists are able to help a child, but it also happens on rare occasions.
As a rule, advices to calm down, not to worry about, can’t help a child to get rid of speech problems and sometimes they even worsen his or her condition. It happens because, for example, a child is in a good mood, something good happened to him, so he wants to share these emotions with somebody as soon as possible. But people advise him to calm down, not to get emotional in order to avoid stuttering. Thus, perhaps people don’t hear his stuttering, but internally he can feel uncomfortable because he stifled his real emotions in order to speak “normally”. Actually this speech is not normal and of course a child understands that he has just artificially created “dead”, empty speech. Of course, these his results can’t at least satisfy fully.
Sometimes a child, who doesn’t know any different ways to eliminate stuttering, often uses such techniques which are not normal. And because of them he regularly has such negative mental condition. I can’t say that it is deadly and terrible, it is not true, because a man, who stutters, is able to live and develop. But it would have been great, if in early childhood (when I just began to stutter) a qualified specialist had worked with me on stuttering elimination. Probably from an early age I wouldn’t have been afraid of communication with my classmates, I would have given a detailed answers and replied orally at school. And I could ask everything I wanted to know (and answered using sentences which I created in my mind, but not those ones which were easier to say without stuttering). Probably if any specialist had helped me, I wouldn’t have had to keep silent in a great number of situations, in spite of the fact that I knew what to say. But I didn’t do it because of my greatest fear of speaking. Also I had the extreme fear of surrounding people’s opinion. It was very hurtful to stutter again and again and to make these weird faces in effort to say something. I understood that for somebody this speech sounds awkward. Somebody felt sorry for me because of my “phenomenon”. Intuitively I realized that a lot of my peers felt superior to me because of this my problem. You know what I mean.
So many times after another speaking with stuttering, after another shame, I tried to convince myself that everything will be ok and my speech will get better in time. But believe me, it was very difficult, concerning the fact that all adults gave me useless advices, which didn’t help me to take steps towards the solution to this problem. I have slowly begun to understand that it is a stalemate and everything I could have done is to accept the fact that I’m a stutterer and to accept all that that implies, realizing that speaking will be difficult for me as it was before.
I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy to stutter from early childhood, especially if form of stuttering is moderate or severe! Speech stupor is my greatest enemy. And observing it today, being a man who understood this problem, I don’t cut anybody slack, fighting against stuttering. If I see that a man speaks more or less normally, but sometimes his speech has some stupor, it’s a clear message for me to help this man to understand how to fully get rid of them. And it is possible: my experience is a living example of it. Even if you have a severe form of stuttering, you can learn how to use your speech organs in such a way that is used by normal/non-stuttering people. Working should be conducted until the moment when the stutterer:
— will understand how to speak without stuttering;
— will start speaking without stuttering;
— will get used to speech without stuttering in any situation, it can be compared with a situation when a man is getting used to riding a bicycle (once he learned how to do it, then consolidated this skill subconsciously, and then he confidently uses it).
Fortunately, in childhood, there is the high probability to fully eliminate stuttering (only using the right approach and professional help). The best and most appropriate way is to use service for the complex retraining of a child, who stutters, in order to have normal speech
I have dealt with this problem at the age of 24. Well, better late than never. And my stuttering didn`t disappear by itself. First, I had to learn in detail several techniques. I had, so to speak, to understand “by touch”, on my own experience the directions in which my efforts should be heading to eliminate stuttering and to get the stable results and normal/smooth/comfortable speech.
I know very well which feelings a child, who stutters, has. I know what a child tries to do with this problem, what he applies and what he hopes for. He or she tries to use certain methods in certain situations (those methods that, according to the subjective opinion of the child, can help him or her speak with fewer stutters). Moreover, it`s very important that I understand the ways of solving this problem not only in adults, but also in childhood. I know how much time you need to eliminate stuttering, what type of support you should get at the stage of consolidation, which exercises and instructions to give, how to check the learned material, etc.
There is one big difference in teaching/retraining adults and children. With adults I work face-to-face, because they are able to take responsibility for their actions. They consciously understand some certain processes. Most adults are aware of what a causal link is. So they can be taught “directly” and I can call things by their proper names.
With children, it’s different. Most of the time, I work with parents, who, in turn, give the information, which they get from me, to their children. And of course, there is the dynamics of understanding the information. And as a rule, the results are not long in coming. If the right approach is used, the child’s speech becomes much better. And he or she gets a lot of satisfaction from this process too. And the most important performance indicator of the training sessions is child`s eyes which are shining with happiness. Yes, you will see such a result, when your child begins to speak normally, without stuttering time after time. This didn`t happen to me because I didn`t have such a teacher who could have helped me. I needed neither a speech therapist, nor a psychologist, nor a psychotherapist, but somebody who knows this problem and the ways of its solution very well. Circumstances were such that I became such a teacher for many people. And I’m happy to know that my training sessions can really help in stuttering elimination.