16th Annual Fluency Friday This Week

The 16th annual Fluency Friday is being held on Friday, Feb. 19, at the Centennial Barn on Compton Road in Wyoming. Fluency Friday offers individual and group treatment sessions for children and teens who stutter. The full day program is a collaborative effort between the University of Cincinnati (UC), Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the Hamilton County Educational Service Center. 

The treatment sessions are provided by graduate students from the UC Communications Sciences and Disorders program at the College of Allied Health Sciences (CAHS) and supervised by community licensed and certified speech language pathologists. During the day-long intensive program, each child and teen attending the event will have opportunities to practice speaking in a safe environment and in a variety of fun situations.  Participants are divided into groups based on age and have time to talk about how stuttering affects their daily life and share coping strategies and advice. 

As many as 60 children and teens are expected at the event, and according to Phyllis Breen, adjunct assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders at CAHS, many of them have attended previous Fluency Friday events. "They have so much fun, it’s almost like a reunion,” she says. "Each of those children is assigned a graduate student who is with them for the day. The children and teens are able to talk to the students, they plan activities with the students and they just learn from one another.”

Fluency Friday was founded in 2000 by Diane Games, a Cincinnati speech-language pathologist who specializes in stuttering. The program also includes a parent component in which family members attend presentations by national experts in the field of fluency. These experts provide advice ranging from appropriate treatment for people who stutter, talking to children about stuttering and how to deal with teasing and bullying.