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From: Gunars K. Neiders, Psy.D.
Date: 16 Oct 2012
Time: 13:34:02 -0500
Remote Name: 98.247.240.81
Unfortunately I find myself in a state of respectful but basic disagreement with the basic premise of your article. Let us see where I might have misunderstood you. You wrote "In my clinical experience, teens are motivated to work on their speech if: 1) they know how and why the strategy will help them, 2) the techniques allow teens fit into their peer group rather than stand out from it, 3) the topics/materials are engaging and relevant to their daily lives." Up to now we are in full agreement. This will motivate the teens, but are all three points healthy and will they produce long term benefits instead of only short term hedonistic satisfaction? I see nothing wrong with item #1 and #3. Unfortunately item #2 is the one that has to be parsed, reconstructed and examined under microscope. So what is it that I object to? Not that the teens want to fit in a group, but how they fit in the group. Let the teen emphasize what they really have in common. Be they valley girls or jocks; nerds or socialites; music lovers or outdoor persons let them find a group or grouping of peers where the commonality outweighs the dissimilarities such as height, color of eyes, east coast or southern accent, and yes the degree of fluency in speech as long as the speech is forward moving and flowing not fluent enough for communication. But just as soon as they try to be identical to the group or grouping with respect to speech they are setting themselves up for a fall, because as Sheehan said and many other stuttering therapy authorities say today trying to hide all disfluency is not possible and just gives motivation for avoidance and hence cementing disfluency. It really, really reinforces the self-talk that there is something shameful about re-repetion of sounds. Yes, even innocuous Iowa bounces are not welcome. Wendell Johnson would be turning in his grave. There is one exception, of course, as long as the teenager after emphasizing by deed and word that he or she has a lot of commonality with the group he or she runs with, he or she says: "I am phrasing because it makes me communicate better because like we have a different color of eyes we also have a different speaking pattern."