Treating Young Children Who Stutter: A Family-Focused ApproachThis article is a written transcript of the course, “Treating Young Children who Stutter: A Family Focused Treatment Approach”, presented by Craig Coleman, MA, CCC-SLP on August 25, 2011.
>> Amy Hansen: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to today's Expert e‑Seminar, “Treating Young Children Who Stutter: A Family Focused Treatment Approach” presented today by Craig Coleman. Craig received his Bachelor's and Master's Degree at the University of Pittsburgh. He has served on the legislative council of the American Speech‑Language Hearing Association. Craig currently serves as a Clinical Coordinator in the Department of Audiology and Speech‑language Pathology at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He is also Co‑Director of the Stuttering Center of Western Pennsylvania. Craig is a Board Recognized Specialist in fluency disorders and currently the President‑Elect of the Pennsylvania Speech and Hearing Association. So welcome, Craig, and thank you so much for joining us today.
>> Craig Coleman: Thanks, Amy. Thanks everyone for coming today. That is a lot of applause. That is more than I get in person.
Overview
Anyway, we're going to talk a little bit today about preschool stuttering and what we do from an early intervention standpoint in home, outpatient settings and preschool settings. I think the model that we're going to talk about today can be applied to all three of those different settings which is the nice thing about it because it is kind of dynamic in that way. It is not really a canned approach. We like to look at the kids coming in when they're at preschool level as individual cases. It is nice to have a treatment philosophy that you can work through and principles to guide you as you can go on but you also have to take into account each individual case on its own.
Goals of Treatment
I want to start off by talking a little bit about some of the goals of treatment that we have with young kids who stutter. When I talk about young kids who stutter I'm talking about kids up through about the age of 6 or 7. So this is referring to those preschool children that we see who are coming in and the main question that we're trying to answer for those kids when we see them is do they need therapy or are they likely to outgrow it without getting therapy?
When you look at the goals of treatment for that population, the preschool population - that age 2 to 5, 2 to 6, 2 to 7 range - the overall goal that we have for treatment for those kids is to eliminate stuttering for most of them while supporting their language development. Now, we know we're going to run into those kids every once in a while who, for whatever reason (maybe it is the genetics), are just so strong or there are other environmental factors going on with their own speech and language system that stuttering is not just going to go away even with formal therapy. For those kids your goal is to make it as mild as you possibly can. But for most of the kids in this age group you will be able to eliminate it for a lot of the population.
I think the language development aspect is a really important concept because when you look at some other programs that are out there and if you look at simplifying things in terms of not asking kids to use their own language system but to use one sense at a time, they don't stutter as much. Those things worry me a little bit because you don't really know what long‑term language effect you're getting there. We want to try to maintain a child's language development to keep it on track as much as we can as we're working on fluency.
So the treatment program I'm going to talk about today focuses on the overall goal of helping parents facilitate their child's fluency in real world situations and then after you do that working more directly with a child. So, this program is really all about family focused treatment at its core because you're working with the parents. You're working with a child. And they're both critical pieces of therapy. You know, no matter what preschool intervention you look at for stuttering you're going to look at parent involvement as being a core component of success. If you have any kind of preschool program out there that doesn't involve parent interaction to some degree it is just not going to be successful.
I want to give a little background as I go through what family focused treatment is, what is indirect therapy and what direct therapy means. That terminology I think it is very important.
