Academic Training in Initial Counseling of Parents of Preschoolers who Stutter: A Simulated Caregiver Model

No other therapeutic approach to stuttering in general has achieved the consensus of support given to parental involvement in the clinical management of early childhood stuttering. In most cases, this involvement begins with and is based on information received during the initial evaluation. This extremely important initial step in the therapeutic process often can prove difficult for beginning clinicians, especially given the current landscape of graduate clinical training opportunities. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a framework for the use of simulated caregivers in the process of enhancing the parent counseling skills during an initial evaluation of graduate students in communication sciences and disorders. Though the field of communication disorders has come late to the idea of using simulated patients, there is a rich and varied literature on this teaching tool in other healthcare fields (e.g., nursing, medicine, psychology). What follows is a review of: (1) the factors affecting graduate training in fluency, (2) the need for better training in parent counseling during the preliminary stages of working with preschool children who stammer (CWS), and (3) a possible framework for this incorporating this training in a tightly-controlled clinical opportunity.