Stuttering While Being a Military Kid

     Being a military kid and having to station every couple of years is already troublesome, and having a stutter brings forth more challenges to the individual. My father is active duty in the Army and my mother is in the Army Reserves. I have lived in North Carolina, Alaska, Germany, Texas, Washington and now Alabama. As I got older, moving every couple of years became tough; this was mainly because once I had gotten used to the people around me and felt comfortable with my stutter, I had to move and start over. Every time I moved I had to go through the same advertising process:

-Advertise my stutter to the kids at my school

-Advertise my stutter with the adults at the school

-Make new friends and educate them about my stutter

-Get teased and prove to those people that I am no different than them

    This is just a glimpse into the struggles of being a military kid with a stutter. Another hard part for me was that I had to leave my first and only stuttering community I knew. While stationed in Washington, I got involved with this program in Spokane Washington at Eastern Washington University. It was called SSMP (Successful Stuttering Management Program), which I will discuss more another time. The significance of this narrative is to show how hard it is for a stutterer not to have stability. 

    The best way to help a person that stutters in a new environment would be to make them feel comfortable and to not make their stutter a big deal. For clarification, asking questions about the stutter does not equal making a big deal. Questions would actually help the stutterer advertise about their stutter along with giving you, the listener, more information on how to approach the stutterer.