We have been amazed and grateful that our child’s experience with speech therapy has been both incredibly effective and stress-free. Our child had a word-final speech disfluency for many years, and we had never figured out what to do about it. Waiting it out wasn’t leading to any improvements. Prior experiences with speech therapy had only increased his stress about his speech without making any progress.
The approach that Sisskin Stuttering Center used was entirely different. We met with our clinician weekly online, and she gave us easy daily practice for us to do at home with our child. The daily practice changed week to week, and sometimes sounded like it would be challenging but always proved to be easier than we expected. Within a few weeks, our child had started to be aware of his speech patterns. Within a few months, the disfluency had almost entirely disappeared. Teachers and friends stopped interrupting him, and he was able to get his thoughts out much more efficiently. All of this happened with our child eagerly looking forward to both his speech therapy sessions and his home practice.
The communication we had with our clinician was excellent. She made sure that we knew exactly what to do for home practice, listened carefully to our reports of what we were hearing, and answered all of our questions and our child’s questions. The process was deeply respectful of our child, and our child was never made to feel bad about his speech. As we have shifted from weekly speech therapy sessions to monthly and stopped doing daily practice, we have been delighted to see that the improvement has remained.
There were a number of small clear signs of progress, but no dramatic hallelujah moments. It was a quiet evaporation that meant the world to us.
— L and M
