Childhood stammer

[kimmy22]

I’m looking for any advice on the best way to react to my grand daughters stammer. She’s 4 years old and has stammered for about 6 months progressively getting a bit worse and more frequent.

I have a stammer since childhood and still struggle under stress and hv difficulty when I hv to think about what to say.

My memory of early years was being tutted at in frustration by my dad. My advice to her parents has always been - ignore it - try not to make an issue of it. Now I’m not so sure. Should we sit with her and try and slow her speaking down. It’s hard to know what to do. The school have referred her to speech and language but we know how long that could take .

[Hidden]

Hello

I read your post and thought how could I answer as you have the same thing or the experience yet even when we have we can self doubt so I thought I would just say if it were me in your position I would be doing the exact same thing , pretending I was not noticing as the more you do the worse I would imagine it will make your Granddaughter conscious

I remember when my Son was young he used to have this nervous twitch and would pull such a funny face , it would upset me as I thought others would think there was something wrong with him ( not that other people's views just have mattered ) but I noticed the more I pointed out to him he was doing it the more he did as I believe I had made him more conscious of it

He did grow out of it though even though now as an adult I do notice if he is getting wound up he tends to swallow hard as I can see his throat and adams apple moving

So keep doing what you are doing and wait for the speech therapies to hopefully work their magic and I presume with that support it will get better and eventually go all together or be that mild you will hardly notice it x

[kimmy22 in reply to Hidden]

Thank you so much for giving me your insight. I agree with you - or thought I did, until I watched the other day a program on tv called - “I can’t say my name”. It showed a few young teens who said they thought because there parents ignored it - it became the elephant in the room and they thought their parents were ashamed of it. Which is why I was doubting my ‘advice’.

Anxiety shows in so many forms. And I just hate the thought of her being frightened to speak. I’m so glad yr son has overcome his twitch unless he’s stressed, which I can say is the same for me.

Thank you again. We can only do the best we can for little people xx

[Hb2003]

Hello the best advice I would give you since my friend stammers is by being patient and understanding what could also help is taking a deep breath before saying a word or doing breathing exercises with her to help her . that is my advice

[kimmy22 in reply to Hb2003]

Good advice. Thank you

[Hb2003 in reply to kimmy22]

Your welcome 😊❤️🙏