Stuttering - 29 month old

Hi there.

My niece started stuttering at about 4 years. She worked with a specialist on it and it has now completely gone away.

My son began stuttering around the same age.  I talked with my pediatrician and we agreed just to keep an eye on the problem.  I emailed my son's "village," the folks he sees regularly, and asked them not to comment on the stuttering and to patiently listen to him.  I think that really helped because it didn't become a big deal and he never seemed to realize he was doing it.  It got better around 2.5 and then bad again right after he turned 3.  Then it vanished and has not returned.  (He's now 7.)  Best of luck!

Hi there,

We had a similar issue - no family history of stuttering but all of a sudden, my son could barely talk and it seemed like he was spitting the words out.  He was a late bloomer with speech as well (in part bc of low tone around his mouth that has resolved itself over time) but was doing great until then.  It was very painful to witness and I remember turning away from him in a few moments so he didn't see the tears in my eyes!  At the time I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of friends.  Stuttering is VERY common at that age and can come and go as their bodies and brains work so hard to develop is so many different ways.  While we privately worried about it, we didn't make ANY issue of it all to him, didn't spend a lot of time correcting him or noticing it.  We asked family members not to point it out or discuss it in front of him.  It went away over time.  It resurfaces (though not as severely and infrequently) from time to time.  (We just moved to Berkeley and I hear him struggling a bit with his words now. Not coincidentally, the stuttering presented, I think, in connection my pregnancy with our third - my son is our second child).

I think no huge need for alarm. There are good resources online for some techniques to handle it, but I think the big one for now is to let it be, wait and see.  Again, no family history in our family and this is of course just our own experience.  Good luck!!!

Hi,

Sometimes children whose brain development is much quicker than their motor skill development  develop speech disorders.

It's a lot more common in children than one might think. I've read somewhere that 20% of children have it at some point and the overwhelming majority lose it within a year. My daughter had it when she was around 2 years and I remember the advice that I got was to be completely relaxed. Not to finish her sentences. Give her the impression that I have all the time in the world for her, and always react to what she said and not how she said it. I also remember that they said it came in waves.

If your child seems distressed then see your pediatrician for help. They will surely know who you can turn to for professional help. 

I believe that in our daughter's case it took a year but her stuttering disappeared.

My two younger boys were stutters and they both outgrew it. The older of the two had a really bad stutter starting when he was 28 months old that went on for a little more than a year. He went from being completely understandable to completely incomprehensible in about 2 days. It was crazy. We talked to a couple of speech pathologists who told us that stuttering is like a fine motor skill and their thoughts outstrip their ability to say them. Then they get all wrapped up in doing it perfectly and just can't say anything. They told us we needed to slow down life (not easy with 3 kids, including a newborn, and two full time jobs!) so he didn't feel rushed. We were also told to never bring up his stutter with him and to never complete what he was trying to say. So gone were the days of, "Come on, come on, come on! We need to get out of the house right now!!!!!" and we went to a much more laid back life where if we were a few minutes late it didn't matter. We would sit there patiently while he sent a full minute to say, "I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I saw a d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-dog" and then we would repeat back, "oh, you saw a dog?" I took extra vacation time a few hours at a time to hang out with him or to run errands on my own so I didn't have to drag the kids along. We worked hard to make life easier and mellower. Over time, he started speaking more clearly and the stutter largely went away after about a year, though for maybe a year or two after that if he was tired or got stressed, it came back. But then it wasn't nearly as bad as before, just tripping over words 3 or 4 times before he could say them properly.

The younger got a stutter when my work situation changed. We followed the same steps -- slowing down life and waiting patiently for him to finish everything he said -- and it went away in a few months. Though his was never as bad as his older brother's. We think that his situation it was caused by stress so we tried to make his life less stressful too.

There is a game you can get where the point is to do everything slowly. We never got it but if your son likes games, it might be something to look in to. (Can't remember the name but I think you can get it from the Stuttering Society or whatever it is called. They also have some good books.) 

Is he seeing a speech therapist?  Our kid didn't have stuttering issues, but had an expressive speech delay and we saw tremendous improvement in only 6 months of speech therapy.  I would definitely recommend getting him professionally evaluated if you haven't already!

Hi,

My son developed a stutter at about 2.5 years old.  It only lasted a couple of months.  His father had a childhood stutter, so I wasn't surprised when my son started stuttering.  They both are big talkers and it seemed like my son had the same issue his father remembered having: his thoughts were moving faster than his ability to get them out.  What did surprise me is what worked/didn't work to improve my son's stutter.  The common recommendations to: wait the stutter out, not complete the sentence, and not bring up the stutter with the child did not work at all for my son.  He would get stuck on a word and while I patiently waited it out like it was no big deal, he would get more and more frustrated.  As the stutter went on he would struggle, cover his mouth, and even cry.  What did work for us was to tell him to stop and take a breath. It was my husband's idea because that is what he remembered his family telling him to do when he was little.  I was skeptical because it went against the recommendations.  But sure enough, encouraging my son to stop for a moment and take a breath gave him a chance to re-group and catch up with his thoughts.  Then he'd start over and the sentence would come out normally. After a few weeks of doing that, the stutter disappeared.  In closing, I would suggest following the common recommendations, but if they aren't working, you shouldn't be afraid to try other ways of helping your child.