Part I
What is stammering? If you listen carefully to any public
speaker, you will detect many instances of dysfluency. There
will be 'um' or 'er.' There will be many repetitions of
words or phrases. If you stop listening to the content of
the speech and just count the non-fluencies, you will be
amazed at how many you will find, even in a prepared speech
of a practised and often gifted speaker. No one will call it
stammering. Yet when a child of three or four begins to
speak with the same non-fluencies, many parents begin to
worry.
There are no clear-cut answers to the baffling problem of the
causes of stammering. Anything, it seems, can trigger it
off. Parents, when asked whether they can think of any cause
for the stammer, may report that he copied a child at school.
Or the onset may have been the death of a close relative.
Perhaps the birth of a new baby in the family triggered it,
or when a dog nearly bit him, or when he had whooping cough.
It may have started when Mother went into the hospital, or
perhaps even when he was taken to a therapist about his
lisp.
The list is endless. Sometimes parents claim it began when
he started school; but sometimes they say simply, "We just
don't know." From these examples we have some idea of the
conditions under which stammering is sometimes said to begin,
but exactly why it begins is still a mystery.
There have been many theories about the causes of stammering.
Some theories have been investigated over and over again.
There have been over two hundred studies arising from one
theory that trying to train a left handed child into becoming
right-handed caused the stammer.
Thousands of books and articles have been written about
stammering (in the US they call it stuttering but the words
are synonymous) and numerous suggestions have been put
forward as to the possible causes. However, scientific
research into stammering only began around 1925.
The numerous books and articles are written from different
points of view. Writers often disagree about the cause, or
causes. Particularly when there is a history of stammering
in the family, some parents will be more likely than others
to notice their child's normal non-fluencies and suspect that
he is beginning to stammer.
Once parents begin to suspect that their child is stammering,
they will react negatively to it, and try to correct it. It
has been said that "a stammer begins not in the mouth of the
child, but in the ear of the parent."
Stammering does seem to run in families. Sometimes one finds
it by an uncle, a great-uncle or a cousin, occasionally the
father or mother. There are perhaps two or three stammerers
in the whole extended family. In these families, a child
under certain conditions of stress, may begin to stammer
because he is predisposed to do so.
Another point of view is that a child may begin to stammer
because there is too much stress in his life. Many children
can take great amounts of stress, but this particular child
can take so much and no more. Then some trauma, it may be
quite trivial, as we have seen, is the last straw which
breaks the camel's back, and the child's speech deteriorates
under the strain.
Many parents agree that their child comes under the category
of one of these possible causes of stammering. But there are
still many families where the child's non-fluencies have not
been 'corrected,' where there is no family history of
stammering and where the child has never been under any undue
stress.
It is believed that about one percent of the total adult
population stammer, and it has been estimated that about four
percent of children stammer. So it seems that three-
quarters of children outgrow the stammer spontaneously. But
what about the ones who need help to overcome the dysfluency?
And what help is available? This will be discussed at a
future date.
