Mary, mom to Seamus, age 17
Mary found the most useful part of professional intervention was the parent workshops. “The ‘fix- it’ therapy created more problems—harder problems that the stammering.”
“Seamus got up one day and he couldn’t speak. I did a double take. He’d been absolutely fine the night before. I probably said, ‘let’s go and brush your teeth or let’s get ready for the day.’ I spoke to my husband about it while our son wasn’t around. We were both puzzled and a little bit concerned at first. We didn’t actually know anybody with a stutter. I have since found out that my dad’s brother had a stutter, but he died when he was 22 and I was only two.
Seamus’s speech didn’t improve whatsoever, and we didn’t highlight it. We tried to carry on as normal. Just before he turned six, we had a summer when his speech was really difficult. I rang the general practitioner and had an appointment with a speech therapist about a month later. The speech therapist chatted with him and played a board game. I sat back and watched. She didn’t mention his speech to him at all. At the end of the session, she confirmed he did have a stammer, which we already knew. She said she would book more sessions with him and told us about an opportunity to attend two parent workshop sessions.
These parent workshops were really useful as they told us about the structure of the vocal cords and the tongue and how speech works. We take that for granted. They gave us a metaphor of a bucket full of water. When the bucket is full, the water spills out. Some children may be trying to process a bit too much information. Their buckets, i.e., brains, have reached capacity and things should settle. But of course, they didn’t. We took him to three or four sessions with the speech therapist and we were told that they probably couldn’t do very much more for us at that time.
When Seamus was seven, he was invited to join in with a group of other children with a stammer and they would be introducing the ‘toolbox.’ The kids sat in a circle with parents at the back of the room. We could observe but not take part, probably so that we could learn the techniques and then reinforce them at home. They introduced the toolbox which included around four ‘tools’ including a slide into a word. We were given a laminated sheets with a picture of a toolbox and along the front of it were images that represented each of these four different tools.
I asked one of the speech therapists how they would expect him to remember these. She said, ‘with practice.’ It was like, ‘now you’ve got the tools so off you go.’ Throughout each of the sessions, he became more reluctant to participate. If one of the participants stammered, they would be asked to say it again. The boys in the group were highlighting when the others were struggling or disfluent. Soon he didn’t want to go to the sessions. He would say to me, ‘Why do I have to go? I don’t like it. I don’t know the boys there. I don’t like the boys.’ I remember feeling guilty about sending him. That went on for most of the weeks we went and finally we took a break.
Then he started to develop dreadful secondaries. His eyes would roll, and his head would go back and he would go a funny color trying to force the words out. He went through stages of singing, whispering and avoidance. Then he would say, ‘You tell them Mommy, you say it,’ wanting me to speak for him. When he was around eight, we ended back in speech therapy. She would ask him an open question and he would answer. She made a note of each stammer and tracked the number of times he stumbled. She would say to him in a really condescending way, ‘Would you like to try that again?’ After three sessions, he was heartbroken at the prospect of having to go again and he begged me not to make him go. He was upset, his speech was worse, and I felt they had just highlighted it. He could barely speak at all now. She said, ‘that’s absolutely fine. That’s your choice.’
Then we read your book. This was about 10 years ago, and it changed everything. But what do we do? How do we help? We still felt desperation. It’s our job to do something. What about the rest of his life? What about his friends? What about school? What about girlfriends? What about everything?
After reading your book, we muddled along for a little bit, but I reread it two or three times. We slowed down our speech and stopped bombarding him with questions. He’s an only child and both of us love him so very, very much. Prior to reading you book, we always asked, ‘So how was your day today? Did you play football today? What did you have your lunch today? Who did you play with today?’ We stripped all that back as we realized that what we were doing was more like interrogating him.
We now realize that we were not ‘not doing anything’ but we had changed the dynamic around how we spoke to our son. Every day we focused on doing things to keep him talking. It felt so much more natural.
We try not to be hard on ourselves. We realize the reason that we did what we did was it was what everyone did. We turned to professionals who were supposed to know better, right? I think they had no training and were just making it up as they went along. It almost feels criminal—these kids have to overcome so much because of the therapy. We still have parents demanding a fix and therapists who are willing to do that. People are not listening.
The “fix it” therapy created more problems—harder problems that the stammering. The sessions that we had initially gone to, the parents-only sessions, were really good and I wish we had had more. Those sessions were so helpful, but they were in complete contrast to the toolbox sessions we had later on.
A child is supposed to process a question, formulate an answer, and think about how they deliver that answer—all while trying to remember which tools to use with the sounds they want to make—at the age of seven! It was preposterous. An adult would struggle with that.”