[ Contents | Search | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Gunars
Date: 08 Oct 2006
Time: 12:28:04 -0500
Remote Name: 67.183.183.115
Katrina, 1) In my reading Winston Churchill's generation was raised in boarding schools and there was a great deal of demands/stress placed on the kids. For a while in the House of Lords it was considered "fashionable" to stutter and many people such as Charles Darwin had a stutter that was so severe it kept him from becoming a preacher. 2)Formerly in US it was acceptable to have the middle class children have a childhood without having demands to do well in school to get into better universities, having soccer, ballet lessons, etc. the pressure was off in 1950's, 1960's (I was there I know it). The lower class children or immigrants, like me, had to work after school, had a working mother, etc. and therefore were much more stressed. 3) Now my son's kids (upper middle class) are the ones that are under real pressure: learning to read as soon as they start to talk, soccer, ballet, pre-school, and their mother works as an ER doctor. Talk about stress! :-) I do not dismiss that there is stress in the lower SES, but it is of a different kind. Boy this could be an interesting social research topic: What kind of stress is more detrimental to fluency? 4) When I was young first the Russian's occupied Latvia (1939 when I was learning to talk), then the Germans drove them out and WWII ensued. In my cohort there was an unusually high number of people who stuttered. The numbers of stutterers were much lower in the older kids and much lower in the younger ones. Y'ALL: Is it possible that the stress is the common factor? Gunars