Stammering, its cause and cure

by Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

This Speech-Setting Period marks two very important events in the speech development of the child. First, it marks the period of second dentition or the time when the milk-teeth are "shed" and the new and permanent teeth take their place. This is a critical period and statistics show that there is a marked increase in speech disorders at this time. The second event of importance, both to child and to parents, is the beginning of the work in school. It must be remembered that heretofore the child has been under the watchful care of the parents during most of his hours, while now, with the beginning of his work in school, he is having his first small taste of facing the world alone—even if only for a little while each day.

Regardless of the attitude which the child takes toward his work in school, this work presents new problems and new possibilities of danger from a standpoint of speech development. A slight defect in utterance which at home is passed over from long familiarity, is the subject of ridicule and laughter at school. For the first time in the child-life, the stammering or stuttering youngster may experience the awful feeling of being laughed at and made fun of, without exactly knowing why. He will have to face the questions of his thoughtless companions who will attempt to make him talk merely for the sake of entertaining themselves. To the child who stutters or stammers, this is torture in its worst form. The humiliation and disgrace which the stammering child must undergo on the way to school, in the school-yard and on the way home again, is a tremendous force in the life of the youngster—a force which may seriously impede his mental development, his physical welfare and his progress in school. He finds himself unlike others, deficient in some respect and yet not realizing the exact nature of his deficiency or understanding why it should be a deficiency. He stands up to recite with a constantly increasing fear of failure in his heart and unless he is fortunate enough to have a teacher who understands, is apt to fare poorly at her hands, also. Even in the case of the teacher who does understand the child's difficulty and consequently permits written instead of oral recitations, there is a constant feeling of inability on the part of the child, a knowledge of being less-whole than those about him, which saps the self-confidence so necessary to proper mental development and normal progress. He furthermore misses much of the value of the studies that he pursues, for, as a noted educator has said, "In order for a child to remember and fix clearly in his own mind the things he studies, those things must be repeated in oral recitation." And this the stammering or stuttering child cannot do.

SENDING STAMMERING CHILDREN TO SCHOOL: With these facts in mind, the question arises as to whether it is ever policy to send a stammering or stuttering child to school, knowing that he is afflicted with a speech-disorder. In the first place the parents who send a stammering child to school exhibit a careless disregard for the rights of others and a further disregard for the many children who must, of a necessity, associate with this stammering child, with all the consequent dangers of infection by imitation or mimicry. Speech defects of a remediable nature among school children could be materially reduced by refusing to allow children so afflicted to play or in any way associate with the others who talk normally.

Aside, however, from the question of the parents' obligation to society and to the children of others (which should be, in the end, a means of protection for their own children, as well) there is the bigger and more selfish aspect of the question, viz.: the effect on the child himself.

No better suggestion can be given than that contained in "The Habit of Success" by Luther H. Gulick, who says: "If you take a child that is really mentally subnormal and put him in school with normal children, he cannot do well no matter how hard he tries. He tries again and again and fails. Then he is scolded and punished, kept after school and held up to the ridicule of the teacher and other students. When he goes out on the playground, he cannot play with the vigor and skill and force of other children. In the plays, he is not wanted on either side; he is always 'it' in tag. So he soon acquires the presentment that he is going to fail no matter what he does, that he cannot do as the others do and that there is no use in trying. So he gives up trying. He quits.

"That is the largest element in the lives of the feeble-minded—that conviction that they cannot do like others, and is the first thing they must overcome if they are to be helped. There is no hope whatever of growth, as long as they foresee they are going to fail."

The futility of trying to "cram" an education into a subnormal child has never been better expressed than in the statement quoted above. There is nothing to be gained by insisting that a child who is ill, attend school—and it should be remembered that so far as school is concerned, the child who stutters or stammers is just as ill as the one with the measles, save that the illness of the stammering or stuttering child is chronic and persistent, while that of the other is temporary.

CHANCES FOR OUTGROWING AT THIS AGE: The opportunities for the stammering or stuttering child to outgrow his trouble are about five times as great in the Formative Period, between the ages of 2 and 6, as they are in the Speech-Setting Period, from 6 to 11. In the former, as previously explained, statistics show that about 1 per cent.—or one in a hundred—outgrow their trouble before the age of 6, while after this age the percentage drops to one-fifth of one per cent, or about one person in every five hundred, which is a very small chance indeed.

In speaking of the tendency of parents to wait in the hope that speech disorders will be outgrown, Walter B. Swift, A.B., S.B., M.D., has this to say:

"This suggestion may frequently be offered, even by the physician. Many people say, 'Let the case alone and it will outgrow its defect.' No treatment could be more foolish than this. No advice could be more ill-advised; no suggestion could show more ignorance of the problems of speech. Such advisers are ignorant of the harm they are doing and the amount of mental drill of which they are depriving the pupil. Nor do they know at all whether or not the case will ever 'outgrow' its defect. In brief, this advice is without foundation, without scientific backing, and should never be followed."