‘HOW PLAY THERAPY IMPROVED MY CHILD’S STUTTERING’

Angelica Louw from Joburg recently started taking her four-year-old daughter, Samantha, to a play therapist and is very satisfied with the results so far.

“Sam started developing a little bit of a stutter at two and a half. We were told to just watch it at first, as it was possible that she would just outgrow it. For a while it did improve, but then we had some stress in the family, and it became worse.”

Their speech therapist recommended play therapy to complement the speech therapy, as she suspected that Sam’s problems were primarily emotional rather than physical.

Angelica says she can see a big difference after eight sessions.

“The teacher at school told me that it’s a lot better already, and Sam’s much more fluent with longer sentences. We also saw other advantages: Sam used to shy away from things she didn’t know that well before, but now she’s better – perhaps because she doesn’t battle to talk so much anymore. So there’s also an improvement on a social level.”

Sam enjoys the play therapy sessions. “The therapist goes for basic play techniques (she calls it primitive play) like sand and clay games. They also draw and play with dolls.

“The play therapist told me the reason this kind of therapy helps is that it deflects the focus from her speech, and there is no pressure on her to utter long sentences. She feels comfortable, so her speech is usually more fluent.

“There is also no pressure to say words 100 percent correctly like with speech therapy, because the focus is on playing, and if she makes a mistake, it also doesn’t matter. With speech therapy, Sam stopped talking at the beginning because there is more focus on what she says and how she says it.”