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From: Carmen
Date: 18 Oct 2012
Time: 13:28:12 -0500
Remote Name: 62.220.172.177
Richard, I'll answer to each of your answers. Thank you so much for sharing from your wisdom. It helps me enormously, again. So he was at first as you described for 4-5 months, very mild disfluency, with strong consonant repetitions and sometimes the first syllable but never body struggle. After he was told 4 times (3 times by SLP, once by me at home) "are words jumping in your mouth? That's ok, it happens to other children also" he started to lose control of the jaw and fight from all his little body with vowals, similar to a valsalva mechanism description. I can't prove or be certain about this cause-effect relation but I was observing him and noticing daily all changes (I am researcher and I am used to be sensitive about factors). Your answer to your son was different, you gave hope and you also gave the explanation together with the solution "it will go, it's because you talk so sudden". Actually, I answered something similar the last time he complained he can't talk, I assured him it will go and that I used to do the same as a child (a little white lie that I felt he needed). I hope you understand my issue with this Palin method: it doesn't give hope, it gives reassurance ,comfort, many good things for parents to do, but is all useless if built on the concept: "there is no total recovery". At least 80% of preschool children do get completely stutter-free, studies from all over the world proved it. To simply say to a little child "it's ok that this difficult thing happens to you" might not help at all. You either totally shut up or you come directly with a solution and always sustain it by the hope that it will grow out of it. I didn't mean to let an SLP work on his speech, I just needed to know how to help him when he gets stuck on a voyal, like A-a-a-lice. Some days ago I told him "do you want me to help you? take a breath and let's try say it again together" and then it worked and I congratulated him. I guess he remembers my advice often because I see how he breathes everytime he gets stuck, but this doesn't always help the vowel come out. Maybe I should have told him to use like a syllable-timed-speech way... that's my problem: I have a once in a life-time chance to give him the right path and I don't really know it myself...