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From: pam b.
Date: 10/19/00
Time: 1:36:04 PM
Remote Name: 208.244.111.98
My son just turned 7 and is a very bright articulate perfectionist who has always had a large vocabulary. As a preschooler he would occassionally stutter- mostly first words of a sentence but it was never consistent. I mentioned it to his kindergarten teacher who said that he did not do it in the school setting. This summer (between K and 1st grade) he had a dramatic increase in his stuttering- again almost always the first word to a sentence. Upon entering the first grade I asked his teacher about the stuttering and she again told me they did not notice it at school. 2 weeks ago the teacher did note an occ. stutter and had the school SLP do a brief (10 min) eval- in which she told me that he did not stutter but he does speak very quickly and seemed "stressed and nervous" and that could put him at risk for stuttering. She wants to wait a month to see if this "gets better" Since that time (about 1 1/2wks) he has had a dramatic increase in his stuttering- blocking on words (still mostly beginning words of sentences),using some eye twitching/closing and widening his mouth during extreme episodes of stuttering. He still has times of perfectly normal fluency and his worse time seems to be the end of the day. I am panicking at the rapid progression of the stuttering and we are seeing his pediatrician on monday for his well child check-up. Am I correct in asking for a full speech and language evaluation at a specialist (locally Mass General?) Could there be any correlation with his school work (phonetically sounding out words to write on their own) as it seems as if he is repeating each word When,when,when did we go.... till it sounds perfect??? any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated- we are trying to slow our lives as well as speech down to decrease stressors -and have been reading all these excellent reference articles. Thanks for your time, pam