4 year old suddenly stuttering

[Mpi4]

Hi, looking to see if anyone else has experienced this. My daughter who has just turned 4 has all of a sudden developed a stutter. She has never had any speech problems before and this has come completely out of the blue, no major changes in her life. Has anyone else gone through this? I’m hoping it’s just a phase as she is going to school in August so don’t want her to struggle.

Hi, we had this with our lb at the same age. It came and went for about a year, and every time it happened, we noticed he'd had a massive leap in forming sentences and vocab etc. It was disturbing to watch but his mouth couldn't keep up with his brain.
He's 7 now and hasn't had it for at least 2 years.

Two of my four have done this, to quite a pronounced level! We had a stutter in the family so I was quite concerned but it went as suddenly as it came on and never returned. I can't remember how long it lasted, a few months maybe? I think it was the brain working faster than the mouth/speech/vocab development could cope with!

I used to work in a nursery and quite a few children developed this at a similar age. For some, it was a case of having so much to say thag their brain/ mouth couldn’t keep up. They just were in a rush to speak. For another child, he was copying someone else and we noticed that he used to get interrupted a lot so developed that pattern with speaking.
You could see how jr goes and make a gp appointment or attend a speech and language drop in session!

My 4.5–year-old does this when she’s very excited about something. She’s typically an excellent communicator but sometimes the words can’t keep up, and she’ll repeat a short word 5-10 times before getting on with the sentence. My mum is a speech therapist and says it’s developmentally appropriate.

That said, if it’s causing your DC distress or if it’s happening with great frequency, I’d see no harm in mentioning it to the GP, or getting the opinion of her nursery teachers if she has any.

My daughter did this too and I found it so worrying. We sought advice from a SALTwho suggested daily 1:1 child ledplay, talking really slowly ourselves and never interrupting her. Our DC was aware of it and used to get upset so we reassured her and referred to it as 'bumpy talking' and totally normal. It passed.