st-st-stuttering

As many of you know, I’ve been really worried about Vincente lately. He has become really emotional and has started stuttering really badly very suddenly. All of this started at the same time he suffered two pretty traumatic events – splitting his head open (and all the traumatic ER experiences accompanying said splitting), and being pushed down some stairs.

Unfortunately for me, I can’t tell if the traumatic experiences led to the problems or if they are natural development issues that will work themselves out. Just about this age is where kids start stuttering developmentally, and the emotional thing could also just be a factor of development.

I’m going to take him to the pediatrician on Monday (I hope I like this pediatrician… it’s not the one I usually see). We’ll see what he says.

My gut says that something is wrong. When he first started stuttering, he would say the first word of a sentence over and over again. For example, he would say, “That’s-that’s-that’s a car!” Sometimes he would say the first word up to ten times before the rest of the sentence came out. Just now he said “That’s-that’s-that’s a ch-ch-ch-choo-choo train!” He’s starting to stutter more than one word/sound in a sentence, and he’s also started to not speak at all, but you can tell he wants to say something. He’ll come up to you and look like he wants to say something, but his mouth just stays open and it’s like the whole word, breath and all, gets stuck in his throat, until eventually it comes out, or maybe he changes his mind and says something else. The stuttering also sounds a lot more forced than it did when I first noticed it.

I also can’t help but wonder if the stuttering problem has exacerbating the frustration/emotion issue, and if the speech issue is one of the reasons he’s reverted back to screaming and crying instead of talking.

Anyone who has been through this… advice and words of comfort are greatly appreciated in advance! 8-o