If you, as the father or mother of a stammering child, cling to the second belief, that your child could stop stammering if he would try, then I can see from this distance that your child has stored up for him in the future, more than his due of misery.  For as long as you believe that he can stop of his own free will, you will be impatient with him when he stammers.  You will scold him and tell him to “stop that kind of talking!” Thus you will irritate him, and bring to his heart that sickening sensation that he is totally helpless in the grip of his speech disorder and yet—­ “Oh, why will they not understand?”

Like the first belief, this belief that the child could stop if he wanted to, is based upon ignorance.  No mother or father who has ever experienced the sensation of fear that grips the heart of the stammering child when he tries to speak, will say that he could stop if he would.

I say to you—­and I want to emphasize this—­that the first and foremost ambition of your child who stammers, is to be free from it.  The greatest day of his life will be the day when he can talk without that fear, without sticking and stumbling and hesitating over his utterances.

I say to you again—­if that boy or girl of yours could stop their stammering, he or she would stop it this very instant.  They would never stammer again—­if they were endowed with the power to stop.  But they are not.  That is the very seed of their trouble—­their inability to control the actions of the vocal organs so as to produce normal speech.  They have lost the control of those organs and they cannot of their own volition re-establish that control.

The third belief, that stammering cannot be cured, is so easily demolished that I shall devote but little time to it.  It, like all false beliefs, has its foundation in ignorance.  The mother or father who knows the facts, knows also that stammering can be cured.  You may not know whether your boy or girl can be cured, but you are offered a way to find out—­definitely and positively, by describing your child’s case on my Diagnosis Blank and returning it to me for a thorough Diagnosis.

Put your beliefs to one side—­whatever they may be.  You can get the facts if you want them.  You can learn the truth if you will.  Truth is better than false beliefs and facts are better than superstition or hearsay, which in every case leads to misery, dejection and despair—­a ruined life where a successful, happy and contented life might have been—­except for stammering.

You have a well-defined responsibility to your son or daughter.  You have a duty to perform—­that is, to equip that boy or girl of yours to go out into the world as well equipped as any other boy or girl—­and that means equipped with perfect speech—­without which they will be too greatly handicapped to fully succeed.

CHAPTER IX

THE DANGERS OF DELAY