Information and FAQs about Stuttering for Kids

Another theory is that being "excited" can make you stutter because extra energy from other parts of your brain spills over into the part that controls speech. The excitement can be either good excitement such as going to a party or bad excitement such as being teased or scolded, but the effect is pretty much the same.

You might talk to your speech teacher about doing a real scientific experiment. Keep a stuttering diary for a few weeks and see if you can figure out what kinds of things seem to make you stutter more and what kinds make you stutter less. Don't just look at the big, obvious things such as "being in school" or "going to the beach." Try to be very specific. Do you stutter more when you ask questions or when you answer them? Do you stutter more in math or in English class? In the post office or in the drug store? With men teachers or with women teachers? Figure out your own places and situations to compare. This kind of project can tell you a lot about your own stuttering. If you can figure out just what kinds of things tend to make you feel stuttery, you will have a useful tool for managing your speech.

Think about how you feel when you have to speak in class. Do you feel rushed? Do you feel like people are staring at you, or that the teacher wants you to hurry up and get on with it? If you do feel like this, you should talk to your parents, teacher or speech teacher, and together you can figure out ways to lighten up the pressure a little. Otherwise, just expect that sometimes you will forget to use good speech. That's really OK. As long as you don't get discouraged, you will eventually learn to use good speech without really thinking about it too much. But it can take a long time to learn to do that.

Here's something else that you can do secretly for yourself. Next time you have question-and-answer time or oral reports in class, mark down on a piece of paper the number of times the other kids have to stop and start again, make a speech mistake, repeat a word or a syllable, or goof up some other way. I bet you'll be surprised! You might want to talk about that tally with your speech teacher. You see, everyone screws up speaking sometimes, so stuttering now and then really should not be that much of a problem.

One of the first stutterers we know about may have been Moses, who told God that he couldn't lead the Israelites because he was "slow of speech." He got permission from God to let his brother Aaron do the talking for him at first! Another early example was the Greek orator Demosthenes (pronounced "de-MOS-the-neez"). He made himself into a strong speaker by running with stones tied to his chest (a kind of early weight training) and by practicing speaking with a mouth full of pebbles. You can read about both of these early stutterers on the Stuttering Homepage, in the "Famous People who Stutter" section.

If a person stutters on the ground, he or she probably would stutter in space, too. . The reason is that the muscles that "shift around" in space are mostly the larger, slower muscles that hold a person upright - like the muscles in your legs, sides, and back. In space, without gravity, they don't have much to do so they get weak.

But, hands and faces have small, fast-moving muscles that work all the time, even in space. And the face muscles don't really work against gravity the way the leg and body muscles do.. They work mostly against each other, so I don't think that the lack of gravity would affect stuttering much, if at all.

On the other hand, you probably know that any big change can affect how much a person stutters. An astronaut might be so excited at being in space that he or she might become pretty dysfluent for a while. It is more likely, though, that any astronauts who stutter would be so busy with experiments and work on the space craft that they would not have time to worry about whether they stuttered or not -- and that could even make them stutter less.

Either way, since stuttering has just about nothing to do with the things that astronauts do, it would be no reason at all to keep someone from becoming an astronaut. Why don't you two design an experiment and propose it to NASA? I think it would be very interesting as well as good science to analyze the cockpit and cabin tapes from the shuttle for evidence of stuttering or other speech problems that might be affected by the lack of gravity in space.

The best way to make stuttering diminish is to be open and honest about it, and eventually to learn not to care whether you stutter or not. That can be very difficult to do but it's worth making the effort to learn how. The people whose stuttering stops (or gets so mild that nobody notices) are often the people who can grin and say, "Sure I stutter, but it doesn't matter!" Instead of worrying about stuttering and trying to hide it, they learn to communicate very well. They say what they want to say, when they want to say it, and they don't let anyone stop them.

If you learn to accept and be proud of yourself whether you stutter or not, the chances are that stuttering will not matter once you are grown up. But if you always worry about trying not to stutter, then stuttering will probably be a problem all your life.