DON’T “Wait and see” when it comes to childhood stuttering!
“Wait and see” was the standard advice for parents of preschoolers with emerging stuttering for many decades. Although we now understand so much more about stuttering and its complexity, echos of this (very much outdated) advice are still too common. The truth is, fluency development plays out very differently from one child to the next. While one child may go through a brief period of disfluency and spontaneously recover, another child may not. Timing of intervention is important — the longer a child stutters, the more likely the stuttering is to persist. In an evaluation, speech-language pathologists examine a wide range of risk factors (based on the most current research) to determine an individual child’s likelihood to continue to stutter