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Home › Articles › Development › Stuttering or Learning to Speak?

Stuttering or Learning to Speak?

How to Know the Difference

By Crystal Patriarche

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For parents of toddlers learning to speak, it can be difficult to tell the difference between normal difficulties with speech and stuttering. If your child has trouble talking and hesitates on or repeats certain syllables, words or phrases, he may have a stuttering problem.

However, he may simply be going through periods of normal "disfluency" that most children experience as they learn to speak, according to Dr. Barry Guitar from the University of Vermont and Dr. Edward Conture from Vanderbilt University.

Stuttering is a complex disorder that affects three million Americans, and according to The Stuttering Foundation, a nonprofit organization working toward the prevention and improved treatment of stuttering, there is a general lack of knowledge when it comes to stuttering.

What Is Normal?
The occasional repetition of syllables or words once or twice (li-li-like this), the use of hesitancies and the use of fillers such as "uh," "er" and "um" are signs that a child is learning to use his language skills in new ways, according to Drs. Guitar and Conture.

These "disfluencies" occur most often between ages 1 and 5 years, and they tend to come and go. If they disappear for several weeks, then return, the child may just be going through another stage of learning.

"When my daughter was about 2 years old, we took her to a daycare for a couple days, and she started stuttering at exactly that point," says JoBeth Cox from Indiana, mother of Peytan, now 4. "My mom swears it's because we tried to make her go to daycare, but even when we took her out and put her back with my mom, she continued to stutter."

It was really obvious during about a two-month period, and everyone would notice, she says. "Some family expressed concern about whether or not she was upset about something or stressed, and it was causing her to do it. But after the doctor said it was normal, everyone just tried not to make a big deal when she did it,"Cox says.

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