Parental Level of Anxiety over Stuttering Symptoms in their Preschool Children

Abstract

The multifactorial dynamic pathways theory of stuttering implies an individual combination of complementary factors that may be the cause of this speech disorder. These factors include physiological, linguistic, psychological and environmental ones. The last two are focused on the child’s emotions which are associated with their speech ability and other people reactions to it. Research shows that parents cannot cause the stutter, but quite the opposite, they can be part of a solution to their child’s problem. Because of the increased anxiety associated with speech disfluency, a stutter can affect interaction between the child and their parents. The paper presents the level of parental anxiety because of their preschool child’s stuttering symptoms. The results are broken down by the children’s age and presented in comparison with the type of speech disfluency.

Keywords

• stutter
• speech disfluency
• multifactorial etiology
• anxiety
• attitude
• emotions