Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Stuttering?

Since the search feature on this site is so appealing, I'd like to say that my dad suddenly developed a stutter when he was an elementary student. In his case, it was because of psychological trauma within his safety-zone. Without going into details, he was pulled from a loving environment into one not-so-loving.

He withdrew and began stuttering for the first time. He found his equilibrium once again (as a teen) with the help of some healthy doses of a hobby he loved that gave him an escape from his environment, and the stutter went away.

I bring this up because stuttering can crop up at a later age, and may be from a "triggering event (mechanism)" as Dude noted.

My son (3.5 now) has had a few episodes of stuttering kind of like that and most of his little friends have too. From what I understand it's extremely common for preschool kids to stutter in phases. For him, it was usually when he was gaining some new verbal skills and couldn't quite get the words out as quickly as the thoughts were coming. I haven't heard it in a while.

My DS went through this at 2.5...his was different however, in that he woke up one day and started severely stuttering out of nowhere...literally, I know the actual day... it was not gradual at all. He was always advanced verbally and talked well at a young age...he had just gotten over a severe stomach illness that lasted a month. Turns out he may have had a vaccine reaction. There were some other regressions at this time, bed wetting suddenly...behavior issues worsening...Not scaring you at all, just putting it out there...fortunately in his case, the stuttering now (age 4) has disappeared. We did go to speech therapy from 2.5-3 and strangely enough by 3 it was gone! He went from what the speech therapist tested as a severe stutter to no stutter at all...definitely odd. His might not be the typical case of course. I do feel that the speech therapy was very helpful. I also tried not to bring attention to it because it was obviously frustrating to him. He still to this day has some trouble getting out the information he wants to say especially when excited, but instead has learned to say "um" and things like that or just pause and think

kdoelit: Possibly some kind of post-viral syndrome? I'm told by a neurologist that viral infections sometimes leave lesions in the nervous system that can take one to two years to resolve completely (if they do resolve completely).