With the end of his presidency fast approaching, there is no better time for President Biden to elevate the day-to-day challenges of stuttering into the public dialogue. His words could inspire compassion, understanding, and support for children and adults who stutter as he does.
He can start on Oct. 22, International Stuttering Awareness Day. This day is dedicated to elevating understanding and empathy for the more than 60 million people who stutter worldwide. While great strides have been made, a key aspect of stuttering remains largely invisible to the public: hidden efforts many stutterers use to navigate their daily interactions.
These efforts often take the form of compensatory strategies — what we might call “tricks” — that allow people who stutter to conceal their communication difficulties from the world. As President Joe Biden approaches the end of his presidency, he is uniquely positioned to shed light on this lesser-known but critical aspect of stuttering.
Throughout his career, President Biden has spoken candidly about his experience with stuttering, offering a message that stuttering does not need to define or limit one’s potential. He has often framed his journey as a testament to overcoming adversity, famously remarking, “Nowhere else on earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings one day sit behind the Resolute Desk as your president.”
Biden is proud, as are many stutterers, with what he has been able to achieve despite stuttering. This heroic narrative, however, leaves out a crucial part of the stuttering experience: the under-the-surface strategies stutterers employ to hide their speech difficulties and how these strategies impact emotional well-being and self-expression.
For many, these compensatory strategies start in childhood and persist into adulthood. Tactics like word substitution, stalling, sentence restructuring, or avoiding speaking altogether are learned early on, often in response to the negative reactions stutterers receive when they openly stutter. These strategies become ingrained in their communication patterns, helping them navigate a world that is, too often, impatient or judgmental of disfluent speech, which refers to interruptions in the forward flow of speech.
These “tricks” come at a cost. The constant mental effort required to appear fluent can be exhausting, isolating, and anxiety-inducing. It can also trap stutterers in a cycle of fear and shame — fearing negative reactions of others and feeling shame for not speaking “normally.”
The challenge is not just in the act of speaking but in the continuous mental gymnastics stutterers perform to appear fluent. This internalized struggle is draining and can cause stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. When society’s focus remains fixed solely on the surface-level aspects of stuttering, it overlooks deeper, often invisible struggles people face every day.
Observant listeners may notice Biden using some of these adaptive strategies himself. His political opponents have at times seized on moments when Biden has avoided specific words or stalled before saying something, falsely framing them as memory lapses or “cognitive decline.”
During his vice presidency, Biden would sometimes avoid saying “Obama” by substituting phrases like “my boss” or “the last guy,” a tactic recognizable to many of us who stutter. But while stutterers understand this behavior as part of managing their speech, others see it as a flaw in cognition. Biden has faced criticism for these moments, when, in fact, they are part of a larger story about stuttering that remains underappreciated.
As president, Biden has an unparalleled platform to educate the public about these compensatory strategies and the emotional weight they carry. By sharing more of his personal experiences with these hidden aspects of stuttering, he could shift the narrative beyond surface-level perceptions of speech. Such a shift could foster a greater understanding of the complex realities that people who stutter face. This includes overt speech disruptions and unseen struggles that often go unnoticed by those around them.
Many people, regardless of whether they stutter, have felt the need to hide some part of themselves to fit into social norms. Whether it’s mental health, neurodivergence, or other personal challenges, Biden’s story could inspire people to embrace authenticity over perfection and seek understanding rather than judgment.
