Published by Unseen Progress, an independent publisher of caregiver research. Last reviewed 2026-05-10. Part of the childhood stuttering research overview.
Short answer. Children who stutter are teased at substantially higher rates than their non-stuttering peers, and the teasing is one of the strongest predictors of social anxiety, avoidance, and covert stuttering across the lifespan (Blood & Blood, 2004). The most evidence-supported protective skill is pre-emptive self-disclosure — a brief, matter-of-fact acknowledgement from the child ("I stutter. Sometimes my words get stuck. Just wait, I'll get there.") that defuses the social weirdness before peers can build a teasing pattern around it. Self-disclosure is routinely coached by speech-language pathologists from early elementary age, and the parent's role is to rehearse it at home, alert the school early, and shape a supportive environment around the child (Stuttering Foundation of America; Yaruss & Quesal, 2006).
Peer teasing of children who stutter is not a rare event. Survey studies of school-age children who stutter consistently find that the majority report being teased about their speech, with frequencies substantially higher than non-stuttering peers (Blood & Blood, 2004). The teasing typically takes three forms: direct mockery of the stutter (imitating the repetition or block), social exclusion (not being picked, not being invited), and the more subtle pattern of impatient listeners who break eye contact, finish sentences, or visibly check out mid-block.
The research on consequences is unambiguous. Children who stutter and are also teased show higher rates of social anxiety, depressive symptoms, and avoidance behaviours than children who stutter and are not teased. The avoidance over time becomes covert stuttering — word substitution, situation avoidance, reorganising sentences to escape feared sounds — which Sheehan's iceberg model identifies as the harder long-term pattern to treat. Bullying is not just a social problem layered on top of stuttering; it actively shapes the trajectory of the stutter itself.
The intuition behind self-disclosure is simple. Peer teasing thrives on a difference that seems hidden or shameful. The child who stutters silently and tries to hide it gives peers something to discover, point at, and laugh about. The child who openly names it — once, briefly, in their own words — takes the secret out of the equation. There is nothing to discover; the child has already told everyone.
Research on self-disclosure in stuttering populations consistently shows that listeners rate speakers who self-disclose as more confident, more competent, and more likeable than speakers with comparable stuttering who do not disclose (Healey, Gabel, Daniels & Kawai, 2007). The effect holds across adult and child listeners. From a peer's perspective, the disclosure also functions as a script — it tells the peer how to react ("just wait"), which removes the awkwardness that often gets converted into teasing.
Self-disclosure is not a fluency technique. It does not reduce blocks. It changes the social meaning of the blocks, and that change is what protects the child.
The Stuttering Foundation and clinician consensus position coaching from roughly first or second grade — the age at which peers start noticing differences and a child can rehearse and deliver a short scripted line under social pressure. Some SLPs introduce simpler precursors earlier (a preschooler saying "I have bumpy words" to a curious friend), but the structured technique typically lands in early elementary.
The parent's job at this age is not to coach the SLP technique — the SLP does that — but to create rehearsal opportunities at home and to model openness about the stutter in everyday talk. A child who hears their parent say "You had some bumpy words at dinner — that's okay, you kept going" is being modelled that stuttering is namable and survivable, which is the same emotional frame self-disclosure depends on.
A self-disclosure line is short, calm, and unapologetic. The point is to give the listener the information once, in the child's own voice, and then return to the actual conversation. Examples used in clinical practice and Stuttering Foundation materials:
The line is rehearsed at home, in low-pressure settings, until it can be delivered with a shrug. The shrug matters as much as the words. A defensive or tearful delivery invites the teasing the disclosure was meant to prevent; a matter-of-fact delivery shuts it down.
For older school-age children and pre-teens, the script gets refined to match the social register: more casual, less rehearsed-sounding. "Yeah, I stutter — give me a sec" is a teen-friendly version of the same move. Yaruss and Quesal's work on the Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering (OASES) emphasises that disclosure is one part of a broader self-advocacy stance that adolescents develop with clinical support.
When teasing is happening, parents face a sharper decision tree. Three responses, in roughly this order:
Coach the disarming script. A pre-rehearsed line specifically for being mocked: "Yeah, I stutter. It's how I talk. Come on." Practised at home, matter-of-factly, ideally before the next incident. The shrug-plus-redirect pattern disarms most teasing within a few exchanges because it denies the teaser the emotional payoff they were looking for.
Alert the school. Most teachers do not know about a child's stutter until told, and many do not understand stuttering even when told. The Stuttering Foundation publishes a free teacher brochure that takes 5 minutes to read. Sending it ahead of the conversation with the classroom teacher makes the meeting shorter and the response plan more concrete. Ask for: awareness of teasing patterns, no public correction of the child's speech, no on-the-spot reading aloud without warning, and a named adult the child can go to.
Treat persistent bullying as bullying, not as a stuttering problem. Once teasing crosses into systematic targeting, exclusion, or physical intimidation, the school's anti-bullying policy applies. Document incidents, ask in writing for a response under that policy, and escalate if needed. The child's speech is not the appropriate variable to adjust here; the peer behaviour is.
The parent's contribution to the bullying-and-disclosure picture is not, in the main, the script itself — that comes from the SLP. The parent's contribution is the surrounding environment: a home where the stutter is named openly without shame, where the child sees disclosure modelled by parents talking about their own challenges, where rehearsing a hard conversation is a normal thing to do at the dinner table.
Parents also hold the institutional advocacy role. Teachers, coaches, school counsellors, grandparents, and friends' parents all encounter the child's stutter at some point, and most of them default to one of the harmful reflexes — "slow down," sentence-finishing, looking away. The parent who hands them a Stuttering Foundation brochure or a one-paragraph email explaining how to respond is doing the kind of work that lowers the bullying base rate without the child having to do it themselves.
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