PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

Rationale: As the child is in therapy only two-three times weekly, the parents must involve themselves in the treatment process to assure maximum progress.

Parental communicative style and communicative feelings of guilt, fear and anger must be dealt with through the therapeutic process.

Activities/Techniques:

  1. Several parent-clinician conferences should be scheduled. During these conferences, parental fears, guilt and anger should be assessed and managed appropriately. Parents must be given the time and freedom to express their feelings.

  2. Discuss normal disfluency and normal language development, focusing upon the following developmental areas necessary for the production of fluent speech:

    1. motor coordination and timing
    2. linguistic and cognitive knowledge
    3. emotional maturity

  3. View the film "Stuttering and Your Child" (Speech Foundation of of America, 1977) with the parents, providing feedback and answers to any questions which may result.

  4. Ask parents to assess how they are responding to their child's dysfluencies. Present Cooper's Parent Attitudes Toward Stuttering Checklist (Cooper, 1986) or Zwitman's Child Management Questionnaires and Checklist (Zwitman, 1978). These checklists are helpful to facilitate parental awareness and change.

  5. Explain the importance of parental involvement. Be sure to provide concrete examples of how parents can become effectively involved in the therapeutic process.

  6. View the film "Prevention of Stuttering - Part II" (Speech Foundation of America). When their child stutters, he/she can detect the listener's reaction through both their words and their non-verbal actions. If the child detects negative feelings, the result may be a negative attitude about himself/herself, their speech, or both. This may cause the child to stutter more severely and more frequently. Therefore, it is important for the parent to react the same for both fluent as well as dysfluent utterances from the child. An increase in attentiveness when the child stutters may reinforce the behavior.

  7. Provide the parents with information they can take home. Booklets and pamphlets are invaluable sources of information. The following are suggested reading for parents and teachers:

   (a) "If Your Child Stutters:            Speech Foundation of America
         A Guide for Parents"              P.O. Box 11749
                                           Memphis, TN  38111

   (b) "A Brochure for Parents             John Ahlbach
          of Children Who Stutter          National Stuttering Project
                                           1269 Seventh Avenue
                                           San Francisco, CA  94122

   (c) "The Stutterer in the               Ellin S. Rind, M.S.
         Classroom"                        Stuttering Resource Foundation
                                           123 Oxford Road
                                           New Rochelle, NY  10801

   (d) "To the Parents of the              Peter R. Ramig, Ph.D
         Nonfluent Child"                  Dept. of Communication 
                                           Disorders and Speech Science
                                           University of Colorado
                                           Campus Box 409
                                           Boulder, CO  80309

  (e) "To the Teacher of the               Peter R. Ramig, Pd.D - as above
        Nonfluent Child"

  (f) "Does Your Child Stutter?"           Peter R. Ramig, Pd.D - as above

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