Advice for a Soon-to-be SLP
Hello!
My name is Marissa, I am a second-year graduate student. I’m currently at a school placement and have a few kids on my caseload who stutter. I am not very confident with working with stuttering but really want to be someday. Right now my biggest issue is talking about how my kids feel about stuttering. It feels inappropriate to tell them “I understand” when it comes to their emotions around their speech because I truly don’t know or to just constantly tell them to have “smooth speech”. I love building rapport and strong relationships with my students. Is there anything you wish a teacher/SLP/adult told you or worked on with you when you were young (elementary-aged) to help you with your emotions about your speech?
First of all, I think you’re already demonstrating an important quality that speech therapists should have! It’s great that you want to present yourself in the right way and that you’re extra careful about what you say and how you come across as a safe adult around children who stutter. That’s excellent!
Now, to your question. I don’t think you necessarily need to understand how stuttering feels or is, but rather show understanding for the emotions the child expresses about their own stuttering. As a child and young adult, I always looked for a certain understanding that my difficulty was challenging because inside me, it often felt like the hardest thing I’d ever experienced. It feels so close to the body, so personal and lonely, so getting recognition like, “Yes, I don’t know how you feel, but I understand that it’s difficult,” has been a safe way to be met by others who don’t stutter.
I see you mention “smooth speech.” I’m not sure if you mean fluency or a more comfortable stuttering, but I’d like to take the opportunity to mention that during my upbringing, I had speech therapists who were very focused on fluency and had very little acceptance for how I sounded. Increased attention to fluency can sometimes be very demotivating because every stuttered moment feels like a defeat against a relatively lofty goal. Stuttering is a disruption in fluency, and stuttering comes and goes as it pleases, so I would think that working with children more on acceptance and less on achieving fluency is better for their long-term mental health.
Apart from that, I want to mention that I experienced a lot of empty promises about how “no worries, your stutter will most likely go away, you’re still young.” I held onto that statement until I turned 19. It was a brutal sorrow to go through, losing a part of yourself that you were told would disappear, but never did. I would never advise any speech therapist, parents, or other adults to tell a 6-year-old that. Just as no child in a wheelchair with a chronic disability is told that their legs will start working again when they’re adults, stuttering children shouldn’t hear that either.
Have a great day ahead, and I hope some of my answers were helpful!
Best regards, Ylva
Hi Marissa and thank you for wanting to work with stuttering.
You’re right. I still have a problem with people saying in chat groups “I could do it and so can you”. Do we have the same stutter, the same brain and body, the same background, experiences, parents, teachers, and goals?? Or “stuttering isn’t a problem” (especially when said by someone fluent). Well, for one it isn’t, for another it is. I might stutter and not care, or hide my stutter and feel like a failure if one stuttered word comes out of my mouth. One size does NOT fit all. But, as Ylva already mentioned, you don’t have to understand stuttering, but you can learn more about that your client feels is the main issue for him/her. As that can be something completely different from other clients.
One client (or the parent) might want to be fluent. Tell them fluency might not be for all. That climbing the Mount Everest is too hard for most people. So to set up reachable goals. Maybe tools to get out of a block. Maybe working on acceptance and self-worth. Maybe by giving them the knowledge to learn more about stuttering and explain to others. Maybe by suggesting something else but speech therapy. F ex presentation techniques, yoga, a choir. Or all of the above!
By listening, asking questions and providing a smörgåsbord of things to try, TOGETHER you might find something that fits that very client to reach acchievable goals.
During my whole childhood I was told fluency was good, stuttering was bad. So, as I stuttered, I was bad. I should just stop stuttering or I wouldn’t have a career, a partner, a social life. What I needed to hear was that I was good enough. As a person, an employee, a friend, just the way I was, with stuttering and all. That stuttering might not be what I wished for, but that I had a lot of skills and a personality to be proud of. Only focusing on my stutter, and not on me, the person behind the stutter, not working on my self-esteem, made me feel unseen, unheard.
So listen, ask, and together find our what an obtainable goal is, with many sub goals. Present a smörgåsbord with many options to try, even thinking outside of the box. Whether this might be swimming, singing, yoga, art. Whatever makes you client feel good and being able to express himself and excel in what he does. I now practice public speaking with a group of PWS and the keyword there is FUN! Stuttering is tough, so to make exercises fun, makes it easier to keep practicing. The goal is not fluency, but to love speaking. We are teaching each other tools, but it’s free for all which to use, or even IF you want to use any at all. So working in groups, or even inviting a friend to a PWS to the therapy room can help to do exercises together, cheer each other, and simply have fun doing it.
And tell your client that maybe stuttering isn’t the problem. The problem might be people not learning how to listen.
Keep them talking
Anita