Stuttering Treatment and Research Trust (START)

About Us

Established in 1995, START is a registered charitable trust. Alongside providing support for children who stutter and their families, the trust undertakes research and works to raise awareness of stuttering and its treatment within the community.

Our speech and language therapists have a wide range of experience in working with children and adolescents and are specialists in treating stuttering.

We provide both one-to-one treatment sessions and a range of group treatment options.

Each therapist has the relevant qualifications to practise as a member of the New Zealand Speech Language Therapists Association (NZSTA) and has attended a range of courses and workshops both in New Zealand and internationally to ensure they are up-to-date with current research and practice.

Pre-school aged children

As many as 10% of children between the ages of two and four years will start stuttering. It tends to run in families and may be triggered when a child starts to talk in sentences. Although many children will ‘grow out of stuttering’, some do not.

For these children, treatment in the preschool years is the most effective. It is vital that parents get help from a speech language therapist who specialises in stuttering to ensure they are getting the right advice.

School aged children

Stuttering therapy in the school years is aimed at providing children who stutter with the right tools to ‘say what they want to say, when they want to say it’. Therapy can be either individual or in a group.

Children who stutter can be bullied or excluded by their peers so teaching them strategies for coping with this is helpful and is often more effective in a group setting. Successful treatment involves helping children to be confident and competent communicators and to limit the social impact stuttering has on their lives.

START offers a Confident Communicators Group for children aged 7-10 years old which both the child and their parent(s) attend.

Teenagers

Effective treatment is also available for adolescents who stutter. Stuttering can have a hugely debilitating effect on teens’ lives. Through therapy and support, teenagers who stutter can learn to speak more fluently and subsequently gain the confidence to participate more fully in family, school and community life.

Teenagers can attend individual, group sessions or both. START offers both a pre-teen course (11-13 year olds) and teen course (14-18 year olds). Meeting others who stutter is a powerful way of reducing the social isolation adolescents who stutter may experience.

Location

START is located upstairs in The Stichbury Bidwill Centre in Greenlane. Our therapy rooms offer comfort and privacy for our clients.

Each of the therapy rooms has a large range of age appropriate toys. Children, particularly pre-schoolers, love coming to ‘play’ at START – the pirate ship is a real hit!

There are limited parking spaces available in our carpark. Alternatively, there is on-street parking available at the adjacent and surrounding streets. We are on the third floor and there is an elevator available as well as the stairs.

Prior to your appointment you will be sent out a form to fill, so all you need to do once you turn up for your appointment is wait in our waiting area until your therapist sees you. Our waiting area also has toys for young ones.

The therapist who is going to see your child will then take you and your child through to one of the clinic spaces where the therapy session will take place. Each session usually lasts for between 45 minutes to an hour. All of our therapists are experienced at working with children and making parents feel relaxed and comfortable.

We aim to make our sessions as affordable as possible. We recognise that each family has differing financial circumstances and we are happy to discuss our costs if this is an issue