go through life under
a handicap almost too great to bear.

Write it on your heart that your child will not outgrow his trouble.
Ponder over the information given in the Chapters on Child Stammering.
This is not hearsay or guess-work but facts gleaned from a lifetime of
experience.

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 ma