I actually gave a lot of thought about having children before having them, but strangely never thought of this potentially happening. Then when my daughter was two years old, the day that my wife came back from the hospital holding our newborn son, she started to stutter. Within a week she had full on facial contortions. I was quite honestly horrified because I had never imagined this possibility and seeing her stutter was actually more painful to me than what I experienced myself growing up stuttering. I googled desperately for a solution in English for a few days and didn’t find anything I thought would be useful, and then I did a search in Japanese and our exact situation came up: Second child is born and the first starts to stutter! The solution was apparently to shower the first child with love. I completely ignored my son and focused all my attention on my daughter and a week later she was fine. So, in all, she stuttered (badly) for about two weeks. Now she’s 26 years old and bilingual, to the point that she did 6 months of interpreting on a cruise ship during university. Long story short, neither of the kids stutter. One piece of advice I would provide is that you should try and provide as loving and stable an environment as possible at home. In life, there are always going to be an infinite number of uncontrollable variables so there are no guarantees, but maintaining a strong and stable family unit goes a long ways to working through the inevitable ups and downs. I understand that this is easier said than done, but being conscious and aware of this is the first step. Beyond that, much of life is luck. The older I get, the more I realize this. I’m now to the point where I almost feel like 90% of life is luck. Regardless of all the effort put in on a daily basis, simple things like where you were born, how your parents raised you, your socioeconomic background, the schools you went to, who you became friends with, who you married and where and who you work with are often largely out of your control. In short, if you believe that you would be a good parent, then the world needs your participation.