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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 07 Oct 2004
Time: 09:55:35 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.12.221
Hi Carla, Thank you! I was really honored with the honorary doctorate. Prevention is a key concept. But we must get our facts straight before we mount major prevention efforts of the sort that Wendell Johnson advocates did half a century ago. Their intentions were laudable, but they could not have known that 80% of their stuttering children would have recovered without any treatment at all (i.e., advice to parents not to make any issue of stuttering). Unfortunately, they thought that their advice to "Ignore stuttering and it will go away" was responsible for the recoveries they observed. That is not to say that Johnson's advice to parents that they should not make an issue of stuttering and to be good listeners is bad advice today. Instead, it is simply not sufficient to treat many of the 20% of stuttering youngsters who become chronic. Fortunately, we now have data to indicate clearly that early intervention, i.e., "secondary prevention," is effective. We now need the infrastructure to identify the kids early and make the appropriate help available to them in all parts of the world. That is a tall order. Best wishes, Ken