Stuttering Yada Yada Yada

I talked to my father yesterday about my daughter L.'s speech. I mentioned it to him mostly because I wanted information about the beginnings of my own stutter. I knew my parents always thought I was just imitating my brother, who went through a pretty noticeable period of normal disfluency. But that was all I knew.

My dad says he never noticed my stuttering himself. The speech pathologist who did my kindergarten screening was the one who noticed. The pathologist told my parents that I was demonstrating the beginnings of what he feared would be a serious problem. They put me in therapy, but deep down they didn't think I needed it until, well, until it became obvious a year or two later that I did.

Initially I took this information as bad news. If my speech problem was hardly noticeable at age five, and L.'s is so totally noticeable at age 23 months, that's a little scary. Then I found some information that says a child whose stutter develops after age 3 is more likely to continue stuttering as an adult than is a child whose stutter develops at a younger age. So, oddly enough, I'm finding L.'s early onset of stuttering to be not that upsetting; at least hers isn't developing just like mine. I'll hold out hope that hers won't be as severe in the future.

The severity of her stuttering, however, still concerns me. From everything I've read, her problem is not a "borderline" one, but one that most certainly requires intervention. I haven't read anything at all about secondary behaviors in children under the age of six. I hope I'm just not reading the right stuff and that it's more common than I realize. The secondary behavior has evolved from just the back of her hand over her mouth to sometimes her hand stuffed in her mouth while she is struggling to speak.

She has also developed a strange way of dealing with the word I, which gives her much grief. Just yesterday, she was repeating and prolonging the I with much tension as her voice rose in volume and pitch. Now, however, she is repeating less and simply prolonging a gurgling version of I that sounds more like the Hebrew /ch/ in words like chaim and challah. Is distorting sounds to make them easier to handle a secondary behavior? Whatever it is, she's doing it.

We decided to proceed with scheduling a speech evaluation for her while we wait for E.I. to contact us. I contacted a local speech clinic, filled out and sent in a case history form, and am now waiting for them to contact me about scheduling the evaluation.

It was so bizarre calling the clinic and requesting speech therapy for my daughter. I told them, not so fluently myself, what the problem was and then added, feeling like a total dork for even having to say it, that "stuttering runs in our family . . . obviously." Sheesh.

Which brings me to a related topic. Someone suggested to me that L. might be picking up the stuttering from me -- you know, just imitating me. I'm all about guilt and blaming myself and all that good stuff, but you know, this time I think I'm off the hook. When I'm at home with the husband and kids, I hardly ever stutter. Even when I'm at the grocery or on the phone or any of the other places L. might hear me talk, I don't stutter that severely lately and most certainly not with that secondary behavior -- mine is more uh and um, thank you very much. Funny, but she learned to stutter all by herself. She's independent, that one. She grabs hold of a gene and just runs with it.

That's my girl.