Managing the Environment of the Stutterer

Abstract

Stuttering in children is found to be related to lack of language facility or articulatory proficiency, lack of harmony and/or lack of structure in the child's environment. The model presented emphasizes a goal-directed approach to energizing the resources available in the child's surroundings, i.e., the home and the school, in facilitating speech fluency. Principles and strategies are offered which relate to the two general goals involved with speech fluency and environmental management, respectively. Encouragement and respect, components of satisfactory self-esteem, are integrated into the strategies presented. An attempt has been made to provide principles on which the creative speech-language clinician may devise additional and caring strategies which may prove helpful to disfluent children.