Atlanta Stuttering Therapy

👏 Our 2023 Annual Convention Keynote Speaker has been invited to design a billboard for a 🌆 NYC art museum 🎨 and he wants input from the FRIENDS community!

“I want to make the billboard a celebration of stuttering/stammering pride and acceptance and affirmation. I want the billboard to offer a positive message. I want the billboard to be responsive to the desires of different folks who stutter.”

You can help JJJJJerome by answering the following questions in the comments:

1️⃣ What, if anything, would you want to see on a billboard like this? This could be text, images, etc

2️⃣ If the billboard said “Stuttering is _____”, what would you want to see in the blank?

3️⃣ Anything else you'd like to share?

This Therapy Thursday we're talking about speech play!

One of the most fun things we do with our child clients is playing around with different types of talking. Bumpy talking! Squeaky talking! Low talking! Grumpy talking! Speech play always leads to giggles, but what does it do for our clients? When we look at the rationale for speech play, we see that a seemingly simple activity has complex effects.

Joy and play: For some children who stutter, speech has become stressful. Too much physical and emotional energy are spent trying to talk “just right” and eliminate mistakes. Playing with different ways of speaking can put the fun back into talking, and demonstrate that there are lots of “right” ways to speak.

Control of the speech system: To change their style, a child has to alter many aspects of speech: pitch, rate, volume, and positioning of the articulators. In doing this, they learn that they have choices in how they talk.

Desensitization to stuttering: We often include “bumpy talking” (repetitions), “stretchy talking” (prolongations) and “stuck talking” (blocks) on our list of choices. This gives the child a chance to see stuttering as one of many ways people talk. It also provides the opportunity to introduce helpful messages like, “sometimes people get stuck when they talk, and that’s okay.”

How to do it:

We introduce speech play in lots of different ways. Here are a few you might try:

* Ask the child to brainstorm different ideas with you. How do you talk when you’re mad? How would a mouse talk? If you’re doing teletherapy, you can add visual interest by creating a slide for each voice with a picture the child helps choose.
* Use a spinner tool (online or low-tech) to game-ify the activity by placing each type of speech on the wheel and letting the child spin it.
* Use puppets or other toys to assign each a different voice.



Photo by Amina Filkins from Pexels