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From: Ken Logan
Date: 17 Oct 2011
Time: 21:25:50 -0500
Remote Name: 74.179.121.152
Just to put another twist on this, there's an article by Eugene Cooper in the Journal of Fluency Disorders, written I believe in the mid 1980's that I always think of when this issue comes up. He was not by any means advocating a "cure first" mentality, but he did say (and I'm paraphrasing here) something like this, "When a person asks 'will it go away', 'will I make a lot of progress' etc., I say "I don't know...why don't we get started and find out..." (I'll see if I can round up the exact quote when I'm back in my office tomorrow). With teens, I've found that it is usually not too productive to have lengthy conversations about precisely what will or won't happen in the future..., the important thing is to focus energy on is creating change now. With preschoolers, as others have suggested, one can discuss with parents information about outcomes, recovery, etc., but even in those cases we're talking about group average. When it comes right down to it, at an individual level, it's still a case of, "I'm not really sure, let's find out." (and then, perhaps, to remind the interested parties that even it doesn't "go away" there is still plenty that can be done!!)