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From: Ed Feuer
Date: 16 Oct 2010
Time: 16:47:09 -0500
Remote Name: 142.161.160.195
The speech environment in the child's home is the crucial factor. if the parents exhibit rapid-fire speech patterns, if they are impatience-driven prigs, prone to interrupt the child and fill in, if parents, other adults in the home and the child's siblings maintain a toxic, competitive speech milieu, If they, in various ways, exhibit zero tolerance for anything they regard as dysfluency including grammatical errors, this cannot help but have an extremely negative effect by boosting competitive stress. Ignoring the other side of the equation by focusing on "stutter-free speech" is counter-productive and destructive. Ignoring that toxic home environment is the easy way out for SLPs who prefer not to take on the parents by impressing upon them the importance of changing their own ways. Ditto for the school environment. I can hear the objections now from SLPs: "Doesn't this guy realize how unpleasant that would be for us? Does he have any comprehension of how much extra work and time that would involve?" And I would respond: Maybe it's time to change the sole practitioner model to also involve others from outside the profession in a coordinated multidisciplinary treatment team. edfeuer@mts.net