top of page

Call one of our national lines now:

גימגום בגיל 3

Parents who witness their three-year-old child trying to speak and unable to get words out are definitely going through an unpleasant experience. The question is whether it is stuttering?

In the past, stuttering was attributed not to a disorder in the production of speech, but to some emotional difficulty that causes the child to stutter.

After endless studies, the researchers came to the conclusion that it is an organic neurological failure and not an emotional one. For this reason, emotional and psychological treatments are not the answer to the actual source of the problem, but only to the emotional problems accompanying it (the side effects), and the way to solving the problem itself begins first of all with the speech itself. This requires the successful treatment program developed at the Doctor Fluency Institute, which knows how to combine both treating the underlying issue thus giving the tools for regular speech while instilling confidence a PWS lacked. This leads to alleviating the emotional difficulties involved in speaking.

When is it a speech fluency disorder (stuttering)?

Doctor Fluency Institute experts explain that between the ages of two and five there are children who have already started speaking fluently, will get stuck in the middle of a word or sentence, will lengthen certain syllables, may also add words or sounds and it is not always a disorder of speech fluency. Sometimes it is a stage in the development of the brain and speech.

So how do we know if it is a speech fluency disorder?   When there is a gap between understanding and thinking and the child does not always manage to choose the right words, it is not necessarily a fluency disorder, but when we see that he also has difficulty pronouncing words that he does not need to think about in advance, or repeats syllables more than required from remembering a word, it is probably a speech fluency disorder. And when the child knows what he wants to say and it just doesn't come out. He gets stuck, starts stuttering, etc. And then sometimes this difficulty can also be accompanied by emotional difficulty and feelings of shame, pressure and confusion that cause the child to stutter more..

At Doctor Fluency Institute we tell parents in this situation to support the child, not to make it difficult for them to pronounce the words, not to demand that they pronounce them correctly (because they are probably not able to at this stage) and to compliment them on any success. Any application of pressure and reward for speaking correctly and the like will make him feel that he is being criticized, that there are expectations of him and many times this will be the cause of there inability to speak. Putting pressure of any kind on a child who has difficulty speaking is a bitter mistake that can only exacerbate the problem.

When stuttering persists beyond the age of four, the speech fluency disorder may become established, so it is possible to start treating it already. The standard treatment method of the Dr. Fluency Institute is not suitable for children under the age of 6, but at the age of 4-6 there is another method and you can get details about this, in a consultation with Institute representative.

5% of children develop a Speech disfluency before the age of 3!

Five percent of 3-year-old children will develop speech fluency disorders at one point or another, but in 80% of cases the stuttering goes away on its own without us having to treat it at all. So even when a 3-year-old child starts stuttering, we have to wait and check whether the fluency disorder is fixed or not because most likely it won't require doing anything. Of course, even during this period it is recommended to follow the above advice and only if after the age of 4 the stuttering continues should you contact the Dr. Fluency Institute to consult on the matter and determine a diagnosis.

So how do you overcome stuttering?

In order to overcome stuttering, we must go through a rehabilitation process for the speech system which will teach us again how to control the system and how not to let stuttering dictate the way we produce speech, what I say and our life in general.
You can hear more about the subject in the fascinating lecture we give as part of the compatibility test.

bottom of page