If your child has been diagnosed with a fluency disorder and are wondering what treatment can do, look no further! This article aims to explain the approach behind each speech therapy session and what being “done” can look like. If you haven’t already, check the blog, “My Child Has a Fluency Disorder. What Does This Mean?” to learn more about fluency and what a fluency disorder is.

Before sharing the specific tools used in our fluency sessions, it is necessary to discuss the long-term goal of therapy. After all is said and done, what do should the child to be able to do?

Across all my clients, no matter the diagnosis, no matter the age, one of the most common questions I get as a speech pathologist is about just that, “When will my child be done with therapy?” And I get it! While I love getting the opportunity to work with each and every one of your children, the part we all want is when they no longer need my help. This is the reason we are here after all!

A common thought regarding fluency treatment is that they will be ready for discharge, or “done,” when they have stopped stuttering. While that idea of getting the child to have no “errors” may be applicable to many speech therapy long-term goals, this is actually not necessary true for those who seek fluency treatment.

What makes fluency treatment different? People who stutter can go through life experiencing varying degrees of disfluencies, and yes, that can even mean periods of time where they have none; however, their fluency disorder is typically something that will always be a part of them. Due to this, you cannot truly “cure” a fluency disorder.

So, if speech pathologists cannot cure, what can they do? The goal of fluency treatment lies within the notion that therapy will help children become more educated about fluency, aware of their own disfluencies, and confident about their speech. We provide them with a variety of tools that they will then be able to use when they step outside our office to help them functionally communicate their wants, needs, and ideas. At the end of it all, we want them to be able to confidently march into any room or be placed in any situation and speak freely, whether or not they are experiencing moments of stuttering.

Now, this is not to say that we don’t work on decreasing their disfluencies, but rather that we don’t view it as the main indicator of success. Our readiness meter goes off when the child is happy with their speech and both the child and their therapist has full confidence that they will know how to handle any situation or instance in which they are stuttering. That being said, I can confidently say that this approach does lead to a major decrease in their total number of disfluencies, even cases where there is no detectable fluency disorder, but it is important to keep in mind that there is always a continuum of outcomes related to the factors that we have previously discussed.

Now that you know what therapy can and cannot do, you may be wondering, “What does that type of treatment look like?” Hop on over to the next blog in this sereies where we will dive into a variety of tools and approaches that a speech therapist may use when working with a fluency disorder.