Hearing and Kids

An article published last week in Pediatrics reports on research which will add critical information to the debate about using sign language and/or spoken language when educating children who are deaf and hard of hearing. As we all know, 92% of children with hearing loss are born to families with normal hearing who do not know sign language. When they have

When we are working with families of children with hearing loss, especially newly identified children, we are anxious to share information that we think is critical. We (or at least I) want to get technology on babies within days, weeks at most, and get the baby into therapy. As part of this effort, we sometimes do not wait for families

I had the good fortune to spend last week doing workshops in different cities in Norway for Phonak. I got to meet lots of interesting people and, as always, I learned as well as taught.   One of the exciting things was that in Norway, technology is a given. Both children and adults are allowed whatever technology they need, paid

Why is it important for kids with hearing loss to learn to use audition? One of the things we know is that phonics are a basis of literacy. Children learn to read by making sound-symbol associations and then sounding out words. Children learn that the sound /b/ is in the sound at the beginning of the word ball. If they

Why do some kids with hearing loss do poorly? Well, there are likely as many reasons as there are kids who do poorly. And there are likely as many solutions.   What is required for success? For children with hearing loss to be successful they need to have language and literacy at age level. What does it take to get

Why do we put technology on kids with hearing loss? One reason and only one reason: to be sure they are hearing well enough to learn speech and language. There is an enormous amount of data demonstrating that the amount of auditory exposure a child receives will determine how much language they develop. Parents can talk talk talk, but if

This week on Thursday April 6, I am going to be awarded the Marion Downs award for Excellence in Pediatric Audiology. It is always an honor to be recognized by your peers. This is an extraordinary honor, and for me a very special one because it recognizes Marion Downs and her work and focuses on Pediatric Audiology. In some ways

Time is everything. There is extraordinary data which shows that the younger a child is the more cortical real estate they have. In other words, the work we do early has a critical effect of what happens to a child. We know experience changes our brains. The video BRAIN POWER:From Neurons to Networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLp-edwiGUU helps describe What happens to the

There was an interesting article in the January 2017 issue of Hearing Review in which Doug Beck interviews Anu Sharma about her work on auditory deprivation. Anu has done extraordinary work on this topic. We have know for a long time, from the work of Anu Sharma and others that significant hearing loss causes changes in brain activity, the auditory

Today’s blog is written by Stacey Lim, AuD. PhD, CCC-A. Stacey  is an assistant professor of audiology at Central Michigan University. Her areas of specialty are pediatric and educational audiology, cochlear implants, and aural rehabilitation. Stacey is co-curator of a museum exhibition, (dis)ABLED BEAUTY: the evolution of beauty, disability, and ability, which focuses on creatively and artistically designed apparel, assistive