Providing Help For People Who Stutter

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Re: Prevention of Stuttering

From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 13 Oct 2004
Time: 08:58:21 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.12.221

Comments

Dear Lisa, Thank you! Yes, prevention of stuttering is important. Buy you might be surprised to know that prevention has been around for a long time. Wendell Johnson inaugurated a massive prevention effort for stuttering based on his diagnosogenic theory. He believed that stuttering began as *normal* behavior (i.e., normal disfluency) that later evolved into stuttering by interaction of a child's level of disfluency, parents' reactions to that disfluency, and the child's reactions to his or her parents' reactions. If parents could be taught not to make an issue of normal childhood disfluency, thought Johnson, stuttering would never develop. At least one--probably two--generations of speech-language pathologists, pediatricians, and others were trained with this idea in mind. The reason this massive prevention effort failed was that Johnson, in spite of good intentions, did not have his facts straight. Stuttering does not usually develop from normal disfluency. (I would argue that it virtually never does.) Also, he did not know that 80% of stuttering children would recover without any formal treatment. He assumed that advice to parents to "Ignore it and it will go away" was the reason so many young stutterers improved. That all being said, Johnson's advice was not bad advice; it was simply not entirely relevant to the onset and development of stuttering. The prevention efforts I talk about in the paper refer to some yet-to-be-refined procedures that would incorporate a combination of secondary prevention (early intervention) and perhaps primary prevention (reducing the risk of stuttering emerging in the first place). A great deal more research needs to be done before we have a better handle on what promotes stuttering in children and what does not. And this research is essential if we are to avoid another unfortunate outcome of the sort Johnson promoted. Thanks for your commentary. Ken


Last changed: 09/12/05