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From: Ann Packman
Date: 10/17/03
Time: 1:35:00 AM
Remote Name: 129.78.64.100
I think this story about your young brother demonstrates very nicely how stuttering can resolve naturally, even after apparently getting worse for some period.
Now to your question about guidelines for intervention for individual children. We cannot know in advance, given our current understanding, whether an individual preschooler will or will not recover naturally. The information about predictors of natural recovery has come from group research and therefore we can only know from that whether or not a child’s chances of natural recovery are high. The same applies to predicting responsiveness to treatment. While outcome studies may identify factors that predict treatment time, these will not necessarily apply to individual children. For example, while we know from group studies that children whose stuttering is severe tend to take longer to recover with treatment than those whose stuttering is mild, we cannot say in advance that treatment will take longer for every child whose stuttering is severe. In short, there are no concrete guidelines for individual children. As I see it, the decision when to intervene in early stuttering will always be a matter of clinicial judgment, taking into account (1) the available evidence on treatment and natural recovery, and (2) the individual circumstances of the child and family.