When a young toddler starts to stutter, it comes as a big surprise to their parents. It's hard to decide what to do next, whether to see a specialist for stuttering or to hope it's just a phase.
I met a woman in her thirties, and her four-year-old son had been stuttering for a long time. She took him to speech therapy because she was very worried about why he was beginning to stutter. It may have started because the boy's father had a very bad stutter, and the boy may have picked it up from him.
A lot of other people get in touch with me to ask why their toddler has started to stutter and what kinds of treatments are out there.
I always tell them to be as patient as they can and try to play games with their child, especially speech games. They can tell their child how to say the word and then tell them to do the same. When they can say that word smoothly, they give the child a lot of praise and tell them how smart they are and how proud their parents are of them. I even think you should give them a small chocolate bar as a reward.
If parents or other family members aren't patient and instead say things like:
"Say what you want, boy"
"Give it up!"
These kinds of comments can make a child feel very bad and make them want to hide away. Some people might think this is an obvious thing to say, but you wouldn't believe how many people have told me this is what they were told when they were babies.
I had a stutter when I was four years old. I went to a lot of speech therapists, and most of the advice they gave me was to slow down my speech and take a deep breath before I spoke. This didn't really help me, and I have to admit that I didn't have the right attitude about it. I thought the therapist couldn't understand what I was going through because they had never stuttered.
After dealing with the speech problem for 18 years, I decided I'd had enough and set out to find my own way to stop stuttering.
It took me almost a year to get rid of my stutter, and now I help other people do the same.
