The Reason Why Some People Start To Stutter/Stammer

Discovering that your child has a stammering or stuttering problem can be a very shocking and unwanted experience. Not all people who have a stutter have it from childhood. I have met quite a number of people who were fluent in childhood, however started to stutter when they were an adult. So what are the causes of a stammer?

There are many reasons people start stuttering in the first place. These are some of them:

It can be as a result of a traumatic event.

Somebody within the family unit may have a speech impediment and therefore as a child they have copied that person’s bad habits.

People may copy a friend at school who has a stutter and then it sticks.

A family member who is perhaps too aggressive and who makes the person feel that they need to rush every word and sentence.

A few years ago, I had a female client who explained how she had developed a stutter. She had been completely fluent until the age of twenty-four. At this age she became pregnant for the first time, she was very happy and excited about the prospects of motherhood and was certainly not prepared of what would happen next.

She was quite nervous about giving birth of the baby and her friends had been winding her up telling her how painful the experience is. She realised that they were only trying to wind her up and basically ignored them but this was much easier said than done as I am sure you can imagine.

The actual giving birth, when the day arrived, was in fact quite an ordeal, very long and very painful. She was extremely shocked about how bad it actually was and for whatever reason she developed a stutter after the birth of the baby, who was a healthy boy.

There are also people who only develop a stutter when they are an adult – I have met a large number of people who this has happened to and for a wide range of reasons. At this age he had a car crash and this was the trigger to him starting to stutter.