3.4 year old suddenly has a really bad stutter

[Dadofason]

Please help as me and my Mrs are worried sick.

My little one has always been chatty and has always amazed us with his vocabulary and words he knows.

Beginning of this week he woke up stuttering really bad. "I want to go to the shops, b-b-b-b-but we have to wait for m-m-m-mummy first."

Sometimes he'll complete sentences okay but majority of the time his sentence will contain a stutter. Shorter sentences don't seem to be as bad.

My wife's lost sleep over this and its really affecting her as he's our only child and we've already noticed he's gone quieter because of this.

Should I wait and see or push for the Lidcombe Program? I don't want to just do nothing!

I don’t know what the lidcomb programme is, but you should push to be referred to a speech therapist or self refer. My son developed a stutter at around the same age. I think it is very common, threads pop up on here fairly regularly about it appearing at this sort of age. In my son’s case it disappeared soon after. But despite it being common, I think it is taken seriously and it’s better to get advice soon (because I think at this age it is easily treatable and if not treated now it can cause long term difficulties so better to get it early).

Thanks for your response Donhill.

Can i ask how bad your sons stutter was?

Has any one else experienced this with their little ones?

Try singing along with him to nursery rhymes or songs with catchy/funny content.
Sometimes, it's just a confidence thing which will pass eventually.

Hi op, sorry for slow reply. My ds’s stutter was pretty bad. Developed quickly, and within a couple of weeks he really struggled to get anything out at all. It was very distressing and worrying to watch. If I remember correctly, one of the tips given by the speech therapist was to put aside 5 minutes a day to play with him on his own with no distractions and no other noise, play completely led by them, with just one parent. For some reason I think the therapist said it should be the same parent each day and kept quite short. I can’t remember the reason why they suggested all that, but I just remember in our case my dh was the one to do it.

Oh and just to be clear the 5 minutes were supposed to all be about play, not focusing on speech.

It can be a developmental thing - they suddenly know all these words and the ability to get them out lags behind a bit. Those cases tend to resolve naturally - but don't make a big thing about it and stress the child out into it becoming an issue.

It might be worth pushing for a referral just because of how bad waiting lists are at the moment - just to get on the list, but I haven't got the percentages to hand but it's fairly high for them resolving in a short period of time naturally.