Stammering, Its Cause and Cure by Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue (recommended reading .TXT) đ
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There are three mistaken beliefs in the minds of many parents of stammering children which must be rooted out before the child will have an opportunity to be cured of his trouble.
These beliefs are:
1âThat the child will outgrow his trouble and therefore need only be permitted to âgrow older,â at which tune the trouble will disappear. 2âThat the child could stop stammering if he would tryâthat the trouble is but a malicious habit of the childâs, which he could put away from him if he would. 3âThat the childâs trouble is incurable and that nothing can be done for him.
All of these beliefs are entirely fallacious and based purely upon ignorance of the cause and progress of the childâs trouble. There is not the slightest scientific foundation for them, they are not beliefs based on facts or upon experienceâyet in many homes, they constitute the chief obstacle between the stammering child and his complete and permanent cure.
As long as you believe that your child will outgrow his or her trouble, you take no steps to have the disorder eradicated.
What happens?
The trouble becomes worse from month to month and from year to year, until in many cases where the âoutgrowing beliefâ persists, the trouble passes into a chronic and incurable stage and the stammering child becomes the stammering man or woman, condemned to go through life under a handicap almost too great to bear.
Write it on your heart that your child will not outgrow his trouble. Ponder over the information given in the Chapters on Child Stammering. This is not hearsay or guesswork but facts gleaned from a lifetime of experience.
If you, as the father or mother of a stammering child, cling to the second belief, that your child could stop stammering if he would try, then I can see from this distance that your child has stored up for him in the future, more than his due of misery. For as long as you believe that he can stop of his own free will, you will be impatient with him when he stammers. You will scold him and tell him to âstop that kind of talking!â Thus you will irritate him, and bring to his heart that sickening sensation that he is totally helpless in the grip of his speech disorder and yetâ âOh, why will they not understand?â
Like the first belief, this belief that the child could stop if he wanted to, is based upon ignorance. No mother or father who has ever experienced the sensation of fear that grips the heart of the stammering child when he tries to speak, will say that he could stop if he would.
I say to youâand I want to emphasize thisâthat the first and foremost ambition of your child who stammers, is to be free from it. The greatest day of his life will be the day when he can talk without that fear, without sticking and stumbling and hesitating over his utterances.
I say to you againâif that boy or girl of yours could stop their stammering, he or she would stop it this very instant. They would never stammer againâif they were endowed with the power to stop. But they are not. That is the very seed of their troubleâtheir inability to control the actions of the vocal organs so as to produce normal speech. They have lost the control of those organs and they cannot of their own volition re-establish that control.
The third belief, that stammering cannot be cured, is so easily demolished that I shall devote but little time to it. It, like all false beliefs, has its foundation in ignorance. The mother or father who knows the facts, knows also that stammering can be cured. You may not know whether your boy or girl can be cured, but you are offered a way to find outâdefinitely and positively, by describing your childâs case on my Diagnosis Blank and returning it to me for a thorough Diagnosis.
Put your beliefs to one sideâwhatever they may be. You can get the facts if you want them. You can learn the truth if you will. Truth is better than false beliefs and facts are better than superstition or hearsay, which in every case leads to misery, dejection and despairâa ruined life where a successful, happy and contented life might have beenâexcept for stammering.
You have a well-defined responsibility to your son or daughter. You have a duty to performâthat is, to equip that boy or girl of yours to go out into the world as well equipped as any other boy or girlâand that means equipped with perfect speechâwithout which they will be too greatly handicapped to fully succeed.
In many of the cases which have come to my attention in the past many years, the stammerer or stutterer has been afflicted with a malady more difficult to cure than stammering, viz.: The Habit of Procrastination.
âOh, I will wait a little while,â says the stammerer. âA little while canât make any difference!â And then the little while grows into a big while and the big while grows into a year and the year grows into a lifetime and he is still stammering.
Several months ago, an old man, stooped in stature, care-worn of countenance and halting of step, presented himself to me for diagnosis. His face was drawn into long, hard lines. His eyes shifted from side to side, glancing furtively here and there.
In his trembling hands was a worn old derby which he turned about nervously as he stood there talking. The nervousness, the trembling of the hands, the drawn face, the shifting eyesâall this was explained by the story that this man told as he sat there beside the desk.
âI fell from a ladder when I was ten years old,â he said. âAfter that, I always stammered. My parents thought it was a habitâI can remember yet how my mother scolded me day after day and told me to âquit talking that way.â But it was useless to tell me to quit. I COULDNâT quit! If I could have done it, certainly I WOULD, for having stammered yourself, you know what it means.
âSchool now began to be a burden. I think I must have supplied fun for every boy on the school grounds during recess-time, for if there was a boy who didnât make fun of me and mock me and laugh at me, then I donât know who he was.
âThen one day I started back to school at noontime, saw a crowd of boys on the corner a couple of blocks away, thought of what a task it would be to go into that crowd or try to pass it. A mortal and unreasoning fear came over me. Try as I would, I couldnât screw my courage up to the point of going past that crowd. But I had small choice. It was either go that way or stay out of school. And stay out of school I did.
âAnd then came the crucial day. I could not ask my parents to vouch for any absenceâI dared not tell them I was not there. So I went back without an excuse. The teacher was angry. She tried to get me to talk, but I could not say a word. So she sent me to the principal. She, too, asked me to explain. Try as I would, I couldnât get the first word out. Not a sound.
âShe, too, failed to understand. Result: I was expelled from schoolâsorry dayânobody seemed to understand my troubleânobody seemed to sympathize with meâa stammerer.
âAlthough I pretended to be at school, before the week was out, my parents found out. Then a storm ensued. I tried to tell them the truth. They wouldnât listen. Father stormed and mother scolded. There seemed to be no living for me there. So I ran away from homeâran away because my parents wouldnât listenâbecause they wouldnât try to understand.
âThen my troubles began in real earnest. I wonât worry you with the details. I got a jobâlost it. Got anotherâlost that. How many times that story was repeated I do not know. And rememberâI was but a boy!â
Here the old man stopped, his head dropped, his unkempt beard brushed the front of a tattered shirt, that had seen its day. He seemed lost in thoughtâhe was living again those days and those nights when he had wandered an outcast from the world. He was living over a lifetime in a moment.
He sat there several momentsâthoughts far away. Then he raised his head and there was a tear in the corner of his eye as he said, âBut why should I go on? Look at me. See WHERE I am. See WHAT I am. You would think I am over 70âI am not yet 50. But it is too late to do any good. Here I am homeless, friendless, almost penniless. Nobody cares what happens. Nobody would notice if anything should happen. Nobody has a job for meâa stammerer. If I could talk, I could work. If I could talkâOh, but why tell it again? It is too late nowâtoo late to do any good!!â
He was right. It was too late. Too late, indeed.
This man was one of the Too-Latersâone of the Put-It-Offs, one of the Procrastinators. His might be called the story of the Man Who Waited.
First, his parents refused to listen. His teachers, even, failed to understand his trouble. And when he got out in the world he put it off, this matter of being cured of stammering. He Waited! He kept saying to himself that he would do it tomorrowânext weekâ next month. And tomorrow never came. Next week and next month ran into next yearâand next year ran into a case that was hopeless and incurable.
He Waited!! How tragic those two words. He Waited! And his waiting sounded the death-knell of a thousand boyhood hopes. HE WAITED!! And health slowly took wings and flew away. HE WAITED!! And the insidious little Devil-of-Fear piece by piece tore down his will-power, sapped his power-of-concentration. HE WAITED!! And that first simple nervous condition turned into something near akin to palsy.
On the tombstone of that man when they lay him under his six-feet- of-earth, they might truly inscribe the words: âA Failureââand should they wish to set down the reason, they might add: âHe Waited!â
To the stammererâs question: âWhen should I begin treatment for my stammering?â and âAt what stage will I stand the best chance of being most quickly cured?â there is but one answer. The time for the stammerer or stutterer to begin treatment for his malady is the day he discovers his stammering or stuttering. The best chance for being quickly cured exists today.
The stammerer, then, to paraphrase Emerson, should âWrite it on his heart that TODAY is the very best day in the year.â He should remember that indecision, delay, uncertainty, vacillation, lead to oblivion and that his only redemption lies in that golden opportunity known asâTODAY!
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Stammering, Its Cause and Cure by Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
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