When a person develops a stutter or a parent realises that their child is developing a stutter they often want to find out the cause. It can be very disturbing and worrying to a person and parents, so what causes a stutter?

The answer is many things can trigger someone starting to stutter. These are some of them:

It can be a traumatic event

It can run in the family

People may copy a friend at school who has a stutter and then it sticks

An over aggressive relative

Last year I had a female client who told me how she had developed a stutter. She was fluent until the age of twenty four. At this age she became pregnant for the first time, she was very happy and excited about the prospects about becoming a mother.

She was apprehensive about the birth and her friends had been winding her up telling her how painful the experience is. She knew that they were only teasing and tried to keep relaxed.

The day of the birth arrived and unfortunately the delivery was particulary hard and she was extremely shocked about how bad it actually was. After the birth of the baby, who was a healthy boy she developed the stutter.

Not all people who stutter have it from an early age, another one of my clients was fluent until the age of nineteen. At this age he had a car crash and this was the trigger to him starting to stutter.

Many people who stutter have a parent or relative who has a stutter and they have picked up their stuttering habit possibly from this person.

There are many stutter treatments now available from one to one speech courses or group courses as well as traditional speech therapy.

Steve Hill

Stephen Hill runs The How To Stop Stammering Centre In England. He offers stuttering therapy courses to help people who stutter to achieve fluency. Stuttering is also known in some countries as stammering.