Can stuttering run in the family?

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I'm just curious...my son stutters a lot and so does my dad.

Stuttering is a learned behavior resulting from stress and can eventually become habitual and very nearly impossible to break.
I began stuttering when I was about 10. A few weeks of mixed thereapy fixed it.

What exactly was involved with your therapy? I'm assuming you went to a speech therapist?

I went to the school psychologist to learn the stressors that led to the stuttering.
I also went to a speech therapist to relearn how to direct my speech.

ok tnx..

When my mom, brother and niece were younger they had a "Brooklyn accent" and sounded like they were from New York. None of them has ever been to New York. They all outgrew it long before their children were born. If an "accent" can be inheritied I suppose something like stuttering can be too.

Sorry; that's not right.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttering ... stuttering

True stuttering (not just stumbling over words from nervousness) is a neurological disorder, and it does run in families. There have been lots of studies on it which show this. Anxiety can exacerbate it, but it is not caused by anxiety. It doesn't have a cure yet, but there are strategies that people can do to control it.

That's just one single theory about stuttering. There are many, including some which suggest a neurological/organic basis. Your stuttering history is very unusual. Most stutterers begin between ages 3-5, and once stuttering lasts beyond the preschool years, it can be extremely resistant to treatment. Also, people who stutter as a population do not exhibit increased anxiety or any other psychological factor as measured by the MMPI that distinguishes them from the rest of the population. There is no evidence for the effectiveness of psychotherapy in correcting stuttering (although it can be helpful to a person trying to deal with the social stigma of stuttering or other issues).

There is such a thing as psychogenic stuttering, which has certain characteristics related to the type of disfluencies and the attitude the person has toward stuttering- maybe that's what you had. That can be fixed much more easily than the more usual kind, and is not true "stuttering"- it's a type of conversion reaction.

But to answer the OP's question, yes, stuttering does run in families, and I think they have even identified regions of certain chromosomes which seem to be implicated in stuttering.