Before the Harvest, Seeds are Planted

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Re: Brave Mom

From: Sandra Gil
Date: 10/11/03
Time: 9:18:22 PM
Remote Name: 166.114.182.26

Comments

Thanks for your nice words an interest. Before I travelled to Utah I learned in the web sites I mention in my paper, fluency enhancenment techniques and I put them in practice right away, like slowing speaking rate, modeling relaxed ways of comunication and specially turn taking and not interrupting while talking. Here in South America people speak very fast, in long sentences and we interrupt each other a lot, its cultural I guess. So it was not easy to change the way of comunicating but it sured payed off, my son's speech started improving right away. While in Utah the treatment he recieved was basically a fluency shaping program.He learned easy onsets, light articulatory contacts and a little bit of easy stuttering. He made a lot of progress while there. Meanwhile I was trained in order to continue once back home. He continued to make progress with me the following months until he started preschool. Before this, the people he interacted with, were basically family members that were educated on stuttering and knew what he needed. When he stepped in the "real world" he wans't able to transfer the skills he had learned. Everybody at school speaks so fast, kids interrupt each other all the time and even though teachers had attended to a presentation I gave on stuttering, they couldnt do much to change things that are part of our culture. What they could really handle well was teasing. So his stuttering started getting worse again although he would be totally fluent during our therapy sessions because he used his speech tools without problem. What has always remained great is his attitude towards talking inspite of his disfluencies. This year I attended the NSA conference in search of more training and while there I met an SLP from NY who talked to me about the Lidcombe program. I ordered the book, learned all I could about it and with the help of that SLP I started with this program 14 weeks ago and he is making a lot of progress. The good thing about this program for us is that neither the speaking rate nor the enviroment has to change because as parents we can do whatever to help our children the problem comes when the outside world has to change too.


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