Just a Phase

   From day one, Lilly has been a vocal baby.  Her vocabulary and language skills are above average (sorry, not just being a proud parent on this one, I have a degree, I would know).  She is inquisitive, comments on people, places, and things, and just loves a good conversation with whoever will listen.  Just after Christmas Lilly's conversation patterns changed, greatly.  Now, I am not one to broadcast my feelings and concerns with regard to my child's development, but this time I think I am aiming to be more informative than anything.  Ok back to Lilly.  Over Christmas break she began "getting stuck" on words and repeating herself.  She would repeat the first word of her sentence several times before moving on.  It was usually the word "I," and was more likely to happen when she was asking a question. The majority of her spontaneous answers came out nice and smooth.  You may be thinking stuttering, but I am not calling it that.  I am calling it dysfluency, the technical term. 
   Hearing her struggle to get her messages across broke my heart.  However, she showed no secondary characteristics; no facial grimaces, no look of panic, no tense muscles.  Just plain flat repetition of words.  I immediately went to my old text books and hit the internet.  Everything I learned in grad school supported the idea that it was a developmental phase and was perfectly normal.  I knew that.  I still know that.  It was just hard to take because her communication skills have always been advanced, and here she was struggling.  I didn't really get upset until I turned to the internet.  I came across article after article talking about how it isn't "normal."  Articles that recommended immediate evaluation regardless of age.  After looking a bit deeper, I noticed that these recommendations were made by people without speech and language degrees.  Some were doctors, some early childhood teachers, some who knows what.  All of them were, and continue to be wrong.
    Lilly's dysfluencies only lasted four or five days and she is back to her old, and always improving, self.  No evaluation was needed, no therapy was provided, and she is just fine.  Moral of the story, check your resources!  People may not know as much as they want you to think they know!