Initial Counseling With Parents of Preschoolers who Stutter: Enhancing Graduate Students’ Skills Using Simulated Caregivers

Abstract

No other therapeutic approach to stuttering in general has achieved the consensus of support given to parental involvement in the clinical management of early childhood stuttering. In most cases, this involvement begins with and is based on information received during the initial evaluation. This extremely important initial step in the therapeutic process often can prove difficult for beginning clinicians, especially because of the current landscape of graduate clinical training opportunities. In this manuscript, I will provide a framework for the use of simulated caregivers in the process of enhancing the parent counseling skills during an initial evaluation of graduate students in communication sciences and disorders. Though the field of communication disorders has come late to the idea of using simulated patients, there is a rich and varied literature on this teaching tool in other healthcare fields (e.g., nursing, medicine, psychology). What follows is a review of: (a) the factors affecting graduate training in fluency, (b) the need for better training in parent counseling during the preliminary stages of working with preschool CWS, and (c) a possible framework for this incorporating this training in a tightly-controlled clinical opportunity.