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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/8/03
Time: 3:44:56 PM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.31
Hi Steve,
Wow. Eight children and 25 years of working with kids. I am sure that your observations point to some important differences between girls and boys.
One of the first things that anyone who deals with stuttering notices is that about three times as many males as females stutter. "Why is that?" you ask. As I replied to another good question in this conference, I don't really know and doubt that anyone knows for certain. As you have observed, males clearly are not the stronger sex when it comes to speech and language related skills.
I would rather emphatically assert that the reason why there are more boys who stutter than girls is *not* because we put more speech pressure on them. That used to be a fairly common corollary to the Johnson diagnosogenic theory (i.e., stuttering beginning in the parent's ear rather than the child's mouth). (I recognize that you are not necessarily implying that.) Instead it appears that males are more vulnerable to whatever genetic, physiological, and psychological variables that combine to produce stuttering.
Girls tend to be more likely to recover from stuttering as children than boys as well. This "fact" fits nicely into a finding by Kenneth Kidd and his associates several years ago that females who stutter had more close relatives who stutter (mostly male, of course) than males who stutter. This means that whatever genetic influences there are to promote stuttering, chronic female stutterers seem to have more of them than chronic male stutterers.
This reply may be off the mark, but I hope it deals with some the issues you raised.
Ken