How you can help a child who stammers part 1

>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=miAkxYSabko

Kirsten Howells, Programme Lead at Stamma, introduces our set of videos on things you can do at home to help a pre-school child who has just started stammering. For more information call our helpline free on 0808 802 0002, weekdays 10am-12pm and 6pm-8pm, or visit https://www.stamma.org • Download or order our information leaflets at https://stamma.org/resources/leaflets • Approximate transcript: • 'Hi, it's Kirsten again. Today's video is about how you can help your pre-school child who has started stammering. • The aim of what you are trying to achieve is to help your child continue to enjoy talking, whether they are stammering or not, and to help them continue to be a confident communicator. The reason for this aim is that stammering is, in its basic form, a physical difficulty, growing out of a physical difficulty with movements for speech. But emotional and psychological reactions can build up on top of this and make it a much more complex challenge, where the child is dealing not only with the physical disruptions in their speech but with lots of other thoughts and emotions attached to the stammering. • What you want to do is to try, as far as possible, to minimize the challenge of stammering to just that physical difficulty - without these other layers of complexity building up on top of it. These emotional and psychological reactions can come from within the child themselves - the way that they experience and respond to disruptions in their speech, the meaning they draw from them themselves. That is much harder for you to affect, although it is possible for you to influence that. • But where you can have a really big effect is on the reactions of people around the child. Because your child can draw meaning from the way they see and interpret other people's reactions. For children who receive a message that stammering is bad, that stammering is unwanted, then those children can begin to go to great lengths to avoid or hide their stammering - and that tends not to be at all helpful. • Trying to avoid it, or hide it, or do weird things so as not to stammer, can actually exacerbate the stammering. It can increase the frequency and severity of those moments of stammering, or it can lead children to go to extreme lengths where they might choose not to talk. Because – hey - at least then they don't stammer and they might think that people are happier when they don't stammer. • So these are the things we don't want for our children. What we do want is… We want our children to enjoy talking. We want them to talk to us, we want them to be confident communicators. And right now, your job is to protect your child and protect their enjoyment and confidence in speaking. • So today we're going to talk about a little bit about how you can do that.'

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