Gather information

When you visit the therapist for your child's assessment it is useful to have available all the details of his medical history, development and any reports from the pre-school, particularly about his speech.

It is helpful also to have kept a record about your child's fluency and give a score of 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest rate of stammering and 1 the lowest. You could do this in your diary once a day based on your average of the episodes of speaking you have observed, or you could print the chart shown below. Put a cross by the average fluency rating for the day.

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Fluency Record

How to use the diary or chart

When you consider the average score for a day, review what your child has been doing then and record that very briefly. For example on Sunday you can see the score is low as his stammering was less severe. Perhaps that was a day when he was playing at home with people he knew and he was more relaxed. However, as every child is different the opposite may have been the case, and he may have been in an exciting situation where he was enjoying himself so much that he felt relaxed and confident.

When you have completed a chart for a week you can start to work out what situations affect your child's speech. There are no rules about this as your child is unique and will be affected differently by situations than another child who stammers.

How to use what you learn from the chart

When you have information about the levels of your child's fluency in different situations you can try to increase the situations in which he is more fluent so as to help him build up his confidence about his speaking. It may be possible to reduce the situations that appear to affect his speech but if that cannot be done, at least you can help him to deal with them by talking with him beforehand. You can hear his worries, answer any questions he has, and then give him support.

Take the chart to the therapist as a starting point for a discussion about your child's speech.

Click on the following links to open a PDF, use the back button on your browser to return to this resource. To save the handout to your computer, right click and choose 'Save as'.

Text for this page: Making a record of your child's fluency for the therapist
Text for this whole section: How to help your child who stammers?