Hearing and Kids

I frequently get questions from families asking about how to know if their child is hearing well enough with technology. Sometimes it is a concern that the child does not seem to be developing language quickly enough. Sometimes it is because the child does not turn to sound. Sometimes other concerns. My first questions is ALWAYS “What does the child

I have been fortunate to have worked in this field long enough to have seen amazing changes. When I started more than 50 years ago, children where not identified until their parents observed that they were not developing speech and language. Usually at about 18 months. They were fit with hearing aids which provided limited benefit because they had limited

School is starting. As we think about what services we need to provide the children, we need to remember that one of the services that we need to provide children with are support services. Children with hearing loss who are mainstreamed are often the only child with hearing loss in their class, and often the only one in their school.

We all know hearing aids make things louder. But does it matter exactly how much louder and whether it makes it louder throughout the frequency spectrum? Everyone will say yes, it does. But how often do we check that hearing aids (or cochlear implants) are doing what we hope they are doing? Is it okay to hear well through 2000

There has been discussion about how much screen time is reasonable for children. When my children were growing up it was less of a problem. The only “screen” was the TV and somehow, even then, I knew that we had to limit time. They were allowed one hour a day. When they were little it was only Sesame Street. As

Please lets test speech perception. I am hearing from so many speech-language pathologists, listening and spoken language specialists, teachers of the deaf and parents that their audiologists are not doing speech perception testing. WHY? What is the reason we use technology? The one and only reason is to improve understanding of speech. Technology makes sound louder, not always clear. By

Living in New York City, it is hard for me to believe that children are already starting back to school. In NY kids go to school until the end of June and then don’t start up until after Labor Day. That said, we need to get our kids ready for school. Starting a new school year can be really stressful

Everyone who provides therapy for children with hearing loss knows about the Ling 6 Sound Test. Why do we do the test and what does it tell us? What does a Child Hear? For children to succeed with listening and spoken language they need to hear. To quote Dan Ling – “what they hear is what they say.” One of

I have recently returned from a workshop I did for the staff at Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln Nebraska. The room was packed with teachers of the deaf, speech-language pathologists, audiologists and school administrators. There was no question but that we needed a remote microphone system to allow everyone to hear. As usual, I was given an FM with a

We all know that we need to provide a lot of language to children to help them develop language, literacy and social skills. Hart and Risley showed in 1995 that children who heard 30,000 words in a 14 hour day had significantly higher language skills and IQ than children who heard 14,000 or 7,000 words. Dana Suskind, and ENT in