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                     Social Factor

Social and Environmental Factors

Throughout this website we emphasise that parents and families do not cause a child to stammer.  However a child’s environment is important as there are lots of things you can do to help.

Daily lifestyles, events, experiences, attitudes, and behaviours that occur at home and school do have an impact on all children in all sorts of ways, and for children who stammer this will include their fluency.

Most families’ daily lives are busy and demanding. There is so much to organize and to remember: full schedules of activities, clothes to find, mealtimes, bedtimes, appointments, school timetables, homework and social lives! There are constant demands and pressures, fun times and conflicts, anxieties and health worries – all normal parts of everyday life.

Some children who stammer may find it difficult to keep up the same pace, or keep trying to get in ahead of others.

However, the fact is that stammering and a fast pace do not go well together.

As adults, our task is to notice and understand the usual pace of life in the child’s environment and decide what can’t be changed and then try, where possible, to adjust those aspects which can be sensibly controlled or modified.

So:

  • If everyone talks at once and at a rapid rate, the child may try to match it

  • If everyone uses very complicated language, the child may try to copy

  • If certain situations are demanding, the child may feel pressured

None of these is easy when you are also stammering.

The view that the environment plays an important role in a child’s stammering is supported by valuable clinical evidence which shows that helping families to notice what they are already doing that helps their child to be more fluent and doing more of this – can be really helpful for their stammering. Small changes can make a big difference to supporting the child’s fluency

      Psychological Factor

                      Genetics or inheritance

Here we are talking about the characteristics that the person is born with. Sometimes we read about “nature versus nurture”, the crossing point between what is inherited and the environment within which we are brought up.

For example, it can sometimes be quite easy to guess where eye colour or height came from with our own parents and grandparents. It is not so easy to explain personality traits, although you do hear people saying “stubborn, just like his grandad”! Character is probably a mixture of both “nature” and “nurture”.

Stammering also seems to be a mixture of both nature and nurture. For some there is a definite genetic link, a blood relative who has had or still has a stammer. It is becoming clearer that many children do inherit a vulnerability to stammering. At the Michael Palin Centre more than half of the children we see have a blood relative who has either stammered in the past or continues to stammer. While researchers are trying to find out more about the genetic links, it will be many years before the picture is fully understood – or whether this will help us to decide which therapy is best for a particular child.

The nervous system and speech fluency

However the research is also beginning to suggest (and we don’t know whether this is linked to genetics) that stammering may be a sign that the child’s developing nervous system for speaking fluently may be less efficient. The implication is that therapy will be more successful in childhood before the problem becomes “hard wired” into a more adult speech system. Children’s nervous systems for speaking continue to change and develop until early adulthood.

To quote Professor Anne Smith from Purdue University at the Oxford Dysfluency Conference in 2008:

“Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder involving many different brain systems active for speech – including language, motor, and emotional networks. Each infant is born with a genetic makeup that contributes to his or her probability of stuttering, however whether stuttering will develop depends upon experience. To learn to speak fluently, a child’s brain must develop many different neural circuits, and these circuits must interact in very precise and rapid ways. Stuttering emerges in childhood as a symptom that the brain’s neural circuits for speech are not being wired normally. For this reason, early intervention is critical, because by shaping the child’s experience, we can affect the ongoing wiring process in the child’s rapidly developing brain. The longer the stuttering symptoms persist in early childhood, the more difficult it is for us to change the brain’s wiring, and stuttering becomes a chronic, usually lifelong problem.”

Gender

Boys are more vulnerable – we don’t know why, but boys are more at risk of other speech, language and literacy problems too.

Oral motor skills

This is related to the planning and co-ordination of the movements of articulation – tongue, jaw, voice box, etc. Some research studies have shown differences in the oral skills of some people who stammer – these may be slower or less well co-ordinated, but are so slight that they are imperceptible without scientific measuring equipment

Brain functioning research

Brain imaging is a new and highly complicated area of research in adults who stammer. Early findings suggest that certain aspects of speech and language may be processed in different areas of the brain in some adults who stammer. What is not yet clear is whether this is at the root of the stammering problem or a result of difficulty in talking. Since it is not ethically possible to carry out these experiments with children, the results cannot be generalised to the younger population. This type of research will be continuing and we will keep you up to date with the latest studies

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