Stuttering Well: The Clinician's Use of Positive Language

[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]


Re: Parent change - ACCEPTING ACCEPTANCE

From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 16 Oct 2006
Time: 18:26:29 -0500
Remote Name: 69.22.238.4

Comments

Judy, thanks so much for the clarification. For the record Judy, it is perhaps my greatest professional challenge to date to work with parents who are so focused on “chasing the fluency God.” When working with young children such as preschoolers, I want to work with the family (as I am sure you do) to hopefully help the child move through and out of the period of stuttering. As children get older and some become what have labeled “persistent” in their stuttering, things change. I agree with you that some, even many parents want “fluency” which in my experience almost always means the absence of stuttering. However, some parents, especially those I work with in the public schools, really do understand that working on being open about stuttering is every bit as important as speaking strategies. You ask, ‘What do I tell parents about increasing fluency?’ Let me give you an example. Recently I began working with a father and his son who stutters. The son, who is a young teen, has been through four or five other clinicians and has been focusing on “increasing fluency” for about eight years or so. This father came to me and asked that I continue to focus on “increasing fluency” with his son and the father actually asked me to work on “prevention.” I explained to dad that I just couldn’t work on “preventing” stuttering because the child has been stuttering for more than eight years. During the evaluation, the son would not openly talk about stuttering and even burrowed his head into his father when I asked a direct question about stuttering. To make a long story short, I was polite, but clear with the father that I could not solely focus on reducing stuttering because of the mountains of shame that the child had built up around stuttering. I also explained to the father in private that I just would not whisper about stuttering (as he wanted us to do) and that I would never use the word “fluency” with his son. I asked dad to begin using the term stuttering which dad admitted he had never done. Dad completely understood and we even had a very candid and open discussion about how dad was going to push me to work on helping his son to NOT stutter and that I was going to push dad to work on accepting the idea of acceptance. In this situation, I felt the “fluency” push the father had in mind was so counterproductive that I needed to be very up front with dad and make it clear that I would not be able to endorse the continued chase for fluency. The game plan we made with the son was to work on making the physical aspects of stuttering easier, to talk openly about stuttering with each other, teachers, family members, and friends, and to also work on reducing the frequency of stuttering.


Last changed: 10/22/06