With What We Have

They did the best they could with what they had at the time. I would argue that most adults who stutter have uttered this line about how their stuttering was handled by their parents during childhood. I have myself. When I have said it, though, it is backs by years of coming to terms, reaching the ultimate realization that it was most assuredly not my parent’s fault for the struggled pattern of fits and starts, hiding and yearning, and avoidance that took root from the moment I stepped behind the double-sided therapy mirrors. 

But that phrase haunts me as a father who stutters raising a child who stutters. There is so much pressure on parents who have a child who stutters to get it right.

I used to hold much more anger towards parents who put their kids in fluency shaping therapy or sent them to intensive sleep away clinics to fix their stuttering. And I’ve spent many hours sitting with the stories of other adults who stutter in which they convey how those experiences shaped who they became, very often resulting in trauma, shame, and stigmatized identities. Fluent speech—however it comes—is not enough to heal and transform the inner reality of coming of age with stuttering. 

For me, I have spent the last 12 years fighting my way to a baseline level of self-acceptance, which equates to outward thriving in every aspect of my life and inner patch-working of fitting the fragments of my stuttering experience together. I know what acceptance is, what it takes to achieve it, and how I know I can’t go back to where I once wondered about life. 

Yet here I am. The time has come to put my money where my mouth has been—modeling the acceptance-based approach to stuttering for my son. What are you going to do, Chris? I’ve written about this before. For parents, me included, the desire to alleviate your child’s struggle takes your breath away, making you feel like you have to do something. What?

Even with all the world-class resources at my fingertips, from renowned speech therapists to self-help organizations, I still feel helpless. Now take the time to stop and think of the parent who doesn’t have this access or a clue of what to do with that burning desire to do something. Do they trust the school-based therapist? Do they seek private therapy or a college clinic? “Siri, show me options for speech-language pathologists in my area who can help fix my child’s stuttering.” 

To be clear, I’m considering this decision point with grace, not anger. Until you have looked your child in their eyes and have held space during their frantic struggle, allowing it to eviscerate your heart, you can’t judge or fault, even if you stutter yourself. 

Worldview altering, right? I know. When you are in the trenches, living it every day, you feel for your parents who did the best they could with what they had. 

I’m in the thick of it. We—my wife and I—are in the thick of it together. Which lever do we pull and when?

We met with a speech therapist without our son for guidance and to get a sense of what to look out for in terms of his progression. And will meet with her again soon. 

There are opportunities to introduce him to the stuttering community, and only minutes away. Is four-and-a-half years old the right time to do so when he doesn’t even know that what he’s doing is stuttering? Should we be telling him that what happens when he talks is stuttering? 

As for disclosure, who do we need to tell that he stutters? Will they just be able to tell and act like respectful human beings? 

These are some of the rhetorical questions that waffle about my mind as I balance the pressure to get whatever we do right and the malaise that is miring my days of late. 

I’m putting my money on the reality that it’s not a matter of when I pull the above levers—in time we will—because the seeds of acceptance and resilient identities are not planted within those options. The seeds may eventually flourish in therapy or the self-help community, but there are more critical parts of the journey through stuttering that we have already gotten right with what we have.

Our son has a mother and a father who have created a safe home environment to express every part of himself, where he is seen, heard, and loved. Since he was born, through the pandemic, and the last year-and-a-half with the onset of his stuttering, we’ve shown him love and taught him compassion. He expresses his feelings when he experiences them in ways beyond what is expected of a toddler. Within this environment, he has grounding relationships with not only my wife and I, but also his grandparents and close relatives. 

However, a specific lever that my wife pulled, in somewhat of an unspoken manner, was to ensure he developed an unbreakable maternal bond. Stutter or not, this was something I always wanted for him because the mother-child relationship sets the foundation for his emotional development. As he heads into the formative years of his stuttering journey and their bond continues to develop, she will be the one he most often turns to for comfort when the side effects do overwhelm him. 

He will have a safe home with a bond through which to buoy him as he learns to experience life with his stutter. Neither parent will ever tell him anything is wrong with the way he talks. This is not nothing. We have done something many generations of people who stutter never experienced. That is what will keep me in the fight alongside him. I will tolerate the malaise for what it is—the uncertainty of when he will stand proudly on his own, stutter and all.