Eliza, mom to 10-year-old Marcus
“As an educator, I developed a social emotional learning survey and had our son take it. It was heartbreaking – how little confidence he had in himself as a communicator.”
“One day our son had woken up at 4 a.m. and consequently was exhausted at school. He was a late July birthday, so he had just turned 4 and got stuck in afternoon 4-K (kindergarten for 4-year-olds). His stuttering was so bad in class he couldn’t get a word out and his teacher felt we needed to refer to speech services. We had not noticed it at home or any place we took our son.
Being a teacher myself, it was hard to hear something was wrong with our child, but we wanted to get him help even though we were still not noticing his stutter at home. As the year wore on, we noticed it more and more and it was no longer just a school problem. At first it was only when he talked to strangers, but then it was when he was talking to everyone. By the time he hit third grade he started to develop secondary behaviors.
We had a poster in his room with turtle talk, take a deep breath – all these visuals of what he was supposed to do before he opened his mouth. My instinct was ‘why do this?’ I didn’t think that laying it on him thicker at home was going to help him. We made a little bit of effort at home, but we left most of it for his therapy at school.
By the time he was in 4th grade (last year) he was pulling his ear and jerking back his head when he was speaking. The speech therapist would always talk about his percent of syllables stuttered and the number of times he spoke incorrectly. At individualized educational plan conferences, they would say, right in front of him, that he needed to just remember to use his strategies. I remember feeling uncomfortable with that – but giving her the benefit of the doubt as a professional.
A turning point:
Last fall I overheard a woman talking about a presentation she attended by another speech therapist who had a different approach. I reached out to him, and he told me about your book. My husband and I both got the book and read it right away – it was a big ‘a- ha’ moment. This new speech therapist met us at a coffee shop and told us his story. It aligned with what was going on with our son and he talked us through how to advocate for our son. Our goal was wanting him to feel confident speaking. He advised us to bring that goal to the speech therapist at school. Coincidently, as an educator, I developed a social emotional learning survey and had our son take it. It was heartbreaking – how little confidence he had in himself as a communicator.
I told the school speech therapist that I would love to continue services if we could just focus on building his confidence. She said she needed to ask her boss. A week later she said, ‘my pupil services director won’t allow me to do these kind of services because it’s not speech therapy – it’s not the practices that we are supposed to be using.’ ‘Really?’ I asked her, ‘Isn’t the goal of speech therapy to help the child feel confident of their speech?’ She said the whole purpose doesn’t matter, that she needed to use the techniques she learned in college and in reading. I had learned so much from the other speech therapist and understood more about the lack of expertise. She did not know of or want to admit the potential damage she had caused. We pulled him from services and within a couple of weeks his secondary behaviors stopped. Since then, we have just been letting him be a kid. We’ve been managing far better on our own than with the therapy we were getting in our school district. It’s not therapy if it’s not working.
As a parent I had no experience or background with speech therapy in general, especially in fluency. I knew nothing. You don’t know what you don’t know. I would have liked to have had a choice of resources and information on the harm that can be done.
I reached out to the speech therapists in my district, and they had never heard about different strategies – they had not heard of your book. It’s heartbreaking when I think of more kids out there going through what our son went through. I really wonder if he had just been left to be a kid, would he be part of the 80% who see the behavior subside by the time they’re seven? Is it possible the therapy prolonged it?”