First post on here so please be gentle with me.
My DD is 14 and has a very severe stutter. She has had speech therapy in the past with little success and is going to be evaluated at a specialist centre in London during the easter holidays in the hope that they can help.
Over the last few years her self-confidence has become non-existant and it breaks my heart. She no longer speaks unless entirely necessary and even then, she finds it impossible to make eye contact. Her stutter is very bad and it takes her a long long time to say anything, including head jerking and eye blinking to try to get it out.
This evening she has come home from school in tears after discovering that she has to do an English oral next week - just five minutes in front of the class but for her this is torture. I asked my DB who also stutters and he said it would have been terrifying for him at that age.
My DH feels that it would be good for her to at least have to do the oral alone in front of the teacher, but I feel that it would break her. She has become almost mute and is very isolated, and I feel that we need to work on her confidence before pushing her in at the deep end. He says that we can't protect her forever and that she will need to learn to stand on her own two feet.
WIBU to ask her teacher to excuse her from the oral, at least until we have seen the specialists? Or am I just making it worse in the long run?
It breaks my heart to see her like this.