[Social conditions of stuttering]

Sixty-seven stuttering and 50 non-stuttering children, all of them aged between three and five years, were investigated regarding their social conditions in an interdisciplinary study. Numerous studies so far conducted into family circumstances of stuttering children and adolescents have supported diverse conclusions regarding the parent-child relationship, personality traits of parents as well as their style of child raising and social status. Most of the resulting publications have concentrated on children from whom stuttering symptoms had been recordable for several years, so that it was not safely verifiable whether the parental behaviour described had been one of the causal factors for stuttering of children or a belated response to that stuttering. The author's own investigations showed significant differences with regard to presence in a day nursery in the child's first year, space conditions at home, attention given to the child, physical exercise, occupational satisfaction of mothers and self-appraising qualities of fathers. These differences, on balance, are interpreted to the effect that in the individual case stuttering may be affected by psychosocial conditions and would then call for therapeutic action, although it appears to be obvious that there are no stutter-specific social factors. These results are likely to confirm experience obtained from work with stuttering individuals by numerous medical doctors, teachers in lalopathology and psychologists who found that in general manifestations of stuttering may be caused and affected by a number of factors, both endogenic and exogenic.