If your little one’s stuttering, you may have wondered when you should get them more help. And if you’ve brought it up to their pediatrician, you might have been told to “just want and see, it’ll probably go away on its own.”

And they’re not entirely wrong for saying that. Of the 8-10% of children who start to stutter in the course of their early childhood communication development, around 85% will recover, usually by age seven, many within 12 months of stuttering onset (Yairi & Ambrose, 2013).

But what if your child’s in that 15% who don’t recover? Who stutter intractably into adulthood? How do we know if they might be in that group? And when should they start to get targeted speech therapy support to give them the best chance to recover and speak as easily as they can forever?

Well, While we can’t say 100% for sure at onset if a child will persist or not, there are a number of risk factors that can make it more likely. We’ll rank them from the biggest risk factor on down. Generally, the more risk factors a child has, the sooner you should consider starting speech therapy. Singer et al. (2020) completed a meta-analysis and found and ranked six risk factors for stuttering persistence, here in order from largest effect size to smallest effect size: