Hearing and Kids

Recent research is indicating that poor language skills in some children with cochlear implants may be related to genetics and the environment rather than problems with the implant. In some cases, siblings of children with CI’s also demonstrated difficulties in language development, suggesting that some of the problems some children with CI’s face may be the result of hereditary or

  Most teachers know very little about hearing loss. If they know someone with hearing loss it is most likely an adult who developed a hearing loss in older age. If they have any experience with hearing aids, they will be from adults who complain that the hearing aids do not sound like what they remember normal hearing sounding like.

Helen Beebe was one of the pioneers who worked to help children with hearing loss learn to  use residual hearing to develop speech and language. Beebe, along with some of the other pioneers, Doreen Pollack, Ciwa Griffiths, and Dan Ling, helped change the way people thought about deafness. They developed the philosophy of auditory-verbal or acoupedics – in other words,

The University of Western Ontario has developed a new test to help evaluate hearing in children. It is a plurals test and it helps identify how well a child is hearing in the high frequencies.   Why are high frequencies important? We need high frequencies to hear plurals, possessives,  tense and contractions. If you don’t hear high frequencies you miss

Thanks to the advanced technology available today, many kids with hearing loss are playing musical instruments. Some will be good and others not – just like kids with typical hearing. I have two kids with typical hearing, both of whom took music lessons as kids. One was really good, and the other wasn’t. It had nothing to do with hearing.

Hearing impaired kids need good role models. Unfortunately, they have been difficult to find. In 1977, the first role model appeared when Lou Ferrigno was cast as The Incredible Hulk. Lou was born in Brooklyn and had a severe hearing loss diagnosed at age 3 years. At 13 he started body building and, as they say, the rest is history. 

With the technology available today, almost all children with hearing loss (83.3%) are being educated in mainstream classes. While mainstream education has significant advantages by providing typical language and academic models and expectations, it also means that additional services will be needed to keep the kids on target. The  itinerant teacher is the person who has a lot of that

On a trip to Northern Thailand in July my husband and I were taken on a visit to a school. The tour guide knew that I was a pediatric audiologist and that I was in Thailand to do some lecturing about managing hearing loss in children.  The school staff asked me what I was interested in seeing. I said I

I just returned from attending the AGBell Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona. This has always been my favorite conference. Probably half the attendees are parents and the other half are professionals, all of whom support listening and spoken language for children and adults with hearing loss. Families and professionals attend meetings together, share information together, and learn together. I love presenting

Everyone who works with children with hearing loss knows that, even with all  the great technology that  is available  today, kids still need help.  Because the technology is so good, school staff members sometimes think that kids do not need any  help. I have had school staff tell me that now that a  child has a cochlear implant he is