Facts from statistics:  An examination of the records of several thousand cases of stuttering and stammering of all types and in all stages of development reveals the fact that after passing the age of six, only one-fifth of one per cent, ever outgrow stammering.  This means that out of every five hundred people who stammer, only one ever outgrows it.  Between the ages of three and six, the indications are more favorable, the records in these cases showing that slightly less than one per cent, outgrow the difficulty.  That means that one out of every hundred children affected has a chance, at least, of outgrowing the difficulty between the ages of three and six, and after that time, only one chance in five hundred.

Suppose you were handed a rifle, given five hundred cartridges and told to hit a bull’s eye at a hundred yards, 499 times out of 500.  Suppose you were told that if you missed once you would have to suffer the rest of your life as a stammerer.

Would you take the offer?  Certainly not!!!

And yet that is exactly the opportunity that a stammerer over six years of age has to outgrow his trouble.

Dr. Leonard Keene Hirschberg, the medical writer, whose suggestions appear daily in a large list of newspapers, has this to say about the possibility of outgrowing stammering: 

“Often when the attention of careless and reckless fatalistic relatives is attracted to a child’s stammering, they labor under the mistaken illusion that the child ‘will outgrow it.’  A more harmful doctrine has never been perpetuated than the one contained in that stock phrase.  As a matter of experience, speech troubles are not ‘outgrown.’  They become ‘ingrown.’  If not corrected at first they go from bad to worse.  So firmly rooted and ingrained into the child’s habits does stuttering become that with every hour’s growth the chance for a cure becomes farther and farther removed.”

This statement from Dr. Hirschberg is a straight-forward, practical and common-sense view of the subject.

The belief that the child will outgrow the malady often springs out of the tendency of the stammerer to be better and worse by turns, a condition which is fully described and explained in the chapter on the Intermittent Tendency.  There is always present in any case of stammering the opportunity for a cessation of the trouble for a short period of time.  The visible condition is changeable and it is this particular aspect of the disorder that renders it deceptive and dangerous, for many, who find themselves talking fairly well for a short period, believe that they are on the road to relief, whereas they are simply in a position where their trouble is about to return upon them in greater force than ever.

From the nature of the impediment—­lack of co-ordination between the brain and the organs of speech—­stammering cannot be outgrown —­no more so than the desire to eat or to talk or to sleep.