Hearing and Kids

Sometimes children have problems understanding speech and, therefore, learning language. Why? It may be hearing loss, it may be a language learning disorder. But it might be because parents and teachers speak too quickly. Little brains move more slowly than grown up brains. They are still working on developing neural connections.   How fast is fast? For children 3-5 years

Who helps to decide what a child with hearing loss needs? Who helps families manage everything? This is not an easy question. Certainly, in the end, it is parents who have to be the case managers, but are parents prepared to do it? How many parents of kids with hearing loss have information about hearing loss before they find themselves

This week’s Blog post was written by my good friend Paige Stringer. Paige is a founder  and Executive Director of the Global Foundation for Children With Hearing Loss and has done an unbelievable job in building services for deaf children learning listening and spoken language in a place where services were not available.  Born with a profound hearing loss, she

This week’s Blog is written by my friend and colleague Lillian Henderson.  She earned a master’s degree from the University of South Carolina in speech pathology and is an LSLS Certified Auditory Verbal Therapist.  Lillian is the lead speech pathologist for the University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s Pediatric Cochlear Implant team.  She has worked with cochlear implant recipients for the

There are some really good old books out there that it would be terrific if young clinicians could read. One of my favorites is Auditory Disorders in School Children, written by Helmer Myklebust and published in 1954 by Grune and Stratton. Myklebust, a psychologist, was a professor of Audiology and Otolaryngology at Northwestern University and Director of the Children’s Hearing

Unfortunately, the world is  a noisy place. That’s bad enough for a child with normal hearing, but it is absolutely dreadful for a child with a hearing loss. Why? Well, children learn more than 80% of what they know through incidental learning. That means they learn by overhearing things around them. We all have had experiences when we said something

Having a child with any disability is overwhelming. Hearing loss is no exception. Having a typical child is an enormous amount of work, as any parent can tell you, so the stress of having a child who requires extra work is understandable. For parents who choose listening and spoken language for their children with hearing loss there are some things

I have just returned from spending 3 weeks in Vietnam working with the Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss (www.childrenwithhearingloss.org). This was my second visit with this group. We went to a teacher training university, a children’s hospital and an early intervention center. Let me start by saying that things are very different in Vietnam. Please go to the Global

I have just returned from spending 3 weeks in Vietnam working with the Global Foundation for Children with Hearing Loss. This was my second visit with this group. We visited a teacher training university, a children’s hospital and an early intervention center. Let me start by saying that things are very different in Vietnam, as they are in many places in

This edition of Hearing and Kids, is written by David Luterman. David was my first audiology professor, he gave me my first job as an audiologist when he started the Thayer-Lindsey Nursery for Deaf Children, and he continues to be my mentor.  I attribute much of my success in pediatric audiology to David. When I first worked with David, I walked