The Causes Why Kids Stutter

Posted by writer on December 3rd, 2009 at 06:45pm

Stuttering in childhood is one of the most common fluency disorders, affecting about 1% of the population at any given time. When a child stutters, he or she speaks with a disrupted flow, often repeating the same sounds, words or syllables over and over again. Often, stuttering is completely natural as children are learning their language skills, although some kids begin to develop behavioral problems or feel depressed if their speech problem persists. Researchers are still examining exactly why people stutter, but there are a number of findings that point to some of the contributing factors in developmental stuttering.

A major National Institute of Health study recently uncovered several locations on a couple of different chromosomes that may point to a genetic reason for stuttering. “The data supports our previous conclusions about the role of genetics in stuttering. Progress in this area will produce some of the most important information in this research in decades,” says Prof. Ehud Yairi from the Tel Aviv University School of Medicine. Over the years, many other studies of families and twins show patterns that suggest nature might deliver a propensity toward stuttering and anxiety.

However, another argument as to why people stutter is that it may be nurture more than nature. Since we learn to talk by listening to people around us, we may pick up bad habits from hearing other family members who may have speech problems. Many parents argue that they do not stutter around their children, although we often stutter when we are nervous or excited, without even realizing it. Several studies found that the most chronic cases of childhood stuttering were found in households where the father also stuttered, which suggests that either nature or nurture is at play.

When looking at why people stutter, many researchers point out that we all have the propensity to stutter at some point in our lives. For instance, if you are being interrogated by police officers, making a 9-1-1 distress call or trying to respond to an aggressive lawyer in court, then you may suddenly start to stutter. If you’re telling a story to someone, you might insert too many “like” or “um” interjections, without even realizing you’re doing so. More often than not, these lapses in language are temporary and disappear as quickly as they arrived. If stuttering becomes an enduring problem in adulthood, then speech stuttering therapy is recommended to find the triggers and cure the symptoms.

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Tags: help for a stuttering problem, people who stutter, problem stutter, stuttering problem, stuttering treatment

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