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Two-week courses at centre offer ways to beat speech impediment For Michael O’Donoghue, getting close to his eldest son was almost impossible. “I don’t ever remember us just sitting and having a chat. I was thinking his childhood would be over and I’d never have engaged with him.” Reggie, 11, has had a serious stammer since the age of two. The fact that things have recently improved for Reggie and his parents is thanks to the experiences of another boy decades ago who had trouble getting to know his own father, comedian Michael Palin. At the newly refurbished centre that bears Palin’s name, Reggie and other children are offered innovative, intensive therapies that are turning around their lives. Palin said he felt closer to his own late father through involvement with the centre. “I feel closer to him, but I just feel sad that he missed out [on therapy] because I think he would have been a happier man. With him it was just something like a curse that we could never talk about. If you talked about it, it was like rubbing salt into his wounds.” More than 100,000 UK children are affected by stammering. Four in five will grow out of the condition, but for those who do not it can have a desperate impact on every part of their lives, their friendships, families and education. Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech did much to raise awareness of speech impediments. A documentary to be shown on BBC1 this week, The Kid’s Speech , provides a moving insight into the condition today. Film-maker David Brindle followed Reggie and two other children at the new Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children, which provides intensive two-week courses. Reggie’s parents say the changes in their son have been remarkable. “Before, he was very isolated and would lock himself away in his room. Now he just babbles and babbles away,” said his mother, Victoria. “The main thing is his confidence; it’s a wonderful change in him. The course was exhausting mentally and physically, but so worth it.” Elaine Kelman and her fellow speech and language therapists at the centre work not just with the child, but with the parents to help them understand the effect the condition has and to show them ways of coping. “It is very upsetting for parents to witness their child’s struggle and it’s a very emotional issue for the family,” said Kelman. “Often other people do not know how to react to a child stammering, so they will either walk away, wanting to end the child’s struggle, or try to finish their sentence for them. The message children get, unfortunately, is that no one wants to talk to them or to listen to what they have to say. The best thing for people to do is to have patience and wait and listen. They will get there in the end.” She said many of the families, who come from all over the country to the centre for the course, are “desperate people” isolated by their child’s difficulties. “The children tell us that,” said Kelman. “They feel like they are the only person in the world who has a stammer.” The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, is also involved with the centre and visited the children in the middle of the course. He tells them about his own stammer. “Sometimes people write about me that I’m a cured stammerer, but that’s not the case.” He has learned to live with it, he says, and works his speeches around what he can’t say. “I can’t start a sentence with an H, that’s a killer,” he said. While the success of The King’s Speech is “doing a fantastic job” of raising the profile of stammers and speech therapy, the downside, said Kelman, was the film’s fuelling of the myth that a dysfunctional upbringing can be responsible for a stammer. “That was the one unfortunate part and was perhaps what they thought back then. Many parents come here with a strong sense of guilt, they feel it is something they have done, but there is no evidence that parenting can cause stammering.” Palin, who was there to see Reggie and the other children make speeches to mark the end of their two weeks at the centre, said he had endless admiration for the spirit of the children affected by stammering: “It’s all there, in your head you’re just like everyone else, and then suddenly you open your mouth and nothing comes out. Imagine that.” The Kid’s Speech will be shown on BBC1 on Tuesday at 10.35pm Children Disability Tracy McVeigh guardian.co.uk