Fantastic reply! Hope more people will join the conversation. I agree with everything you said. I think we can distinguish: * complex cognitive distortions that require a certain amount of cognitive maturity.. for example, older children will have a certain amount of cognitive development, introspection, and abstract thinking for complex perfectionism 'the need for perfect grades in school' * basic cognitive distortions. I think that these simpler cognitive distortions reflect the developmental stage of their thinking, which are likely more concrete and egocentric. So, in that sense, I'd say that young children can still experience or exhibit some basic forms of distorted thinking - specifically surrounding operant conditioning. I explain this in [this scientific model](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stutter/comments/196mdrr/the_role_of_classicaloperant_conditioning_in/). To expand on this further, let's first compare developmental stuttering with other speech disorders.. as we know, stuttering emerges after a period of extensive learning and young children do not stutter on their first words because they haven’t yet developed the language to make speech complex and stuttering typically begins around the time that children are putting a few words together in the phase of error-repair (or rather, error avoidance). Stuttering onset is typically between 2 and 4 years of age after mastery of language skills. In contrast, language or articulation/phonological disorders are evident from the child's earliest efforts to communicate. See the difference? The fact that children do not stutter when they babble or on their first words, but only when they are putting words together, might indicate that there is some kind of learned mechanism that they interact with. A sort of defensive mechanism that prevents thoughts from saying out loud (or rather, that allows or prevents the execution/release of speech motor plans) I mentioned operant conditioning.. what I mean specifically is '*the poorly fine-tuning of the execution threshold*' as a learned mechanism formed by negative experiences and cognitive distortions. Operant conditioning is basically a form of conditioning that occurs when a person’s actions lead to “punishments” or “rewards.. and dopamine plays a crucial role in operant conditioning, that occurs when a person’s speech performance is evaluated by the speaker as “punishing” or “rewarding"