Stammering Therapy for Children
Typically, there is less of intrinsic motivation seen in children and adolescents and they are persuaded by their parents to visit the therapist. Therefore, the sessions for stuttering therapy must be made interesting, joyful and rewarding. The therapy activities must be aimed to achieve fluency, first at the sound level, progressing to words and phrases.
The flexibility of the treatment plan is essential to meet the demands of the child’s changing moods. Improving self-confidence is very important and this can be achieved only if the child trusts and likes the therapist. The child must be able to share the feelings experienced about stuttering with the therapist, and the latter must accept the feelings of embarrassment faced by the child with understanding.
Above all, parents and therapists must work together in the therapy process.
Some techniques used with children for overcoming stuttering are:
- Regulating breathing patterns
- Light contraction of the speech muscles while speaking
- Controlled rate of speech
- Coordination of the mouth parts and breathing
- Desensitization with modified stuttering or voluntary stuttering
- Reducing avoidance behaviors
- Generalizing learnt behaviors to other situations.
Some activities used in stuttering therapy for children are:
- Explaining the sequence of speech production: Respiration-phonation-articulation.
- True or false activity of correct and wrong behaviors’.
- Reading activities: Reading a passage in monster voice, baby voice, sing-song way, squeaky voice and others.
- Place picture cards in a row and roll a ball. Name the pictures as the ball rolls.
- Memory games: The child speaks out the cards and plays memory games.
- Randomly picking up picture cards and naming colors along with the animals or birds in them.
- Picking up shapes or letters from a closed bag, feeling them and guessing aloud.
- Guess what/who: Description of certain things or people as clues for the child to guess the right word or name.
- Puppet shows that the child can participate by using the puppets and giving it voice.
