Hearing and Kids

Dear Readers: During this holiday season, the editors at Hearing Health & Technology Matters (HHTM) are taking some time off. However, we are not leaving you without anything to read on our blog this week. Instead, we are publishing a special holiday edition filled with what we call our Readers’ Choices. Our Readers’ Choices featured this week are the posts

Holidays can be stressful times for all of us. There are lots of things happening and much more to do than during other times. This year holidays have the added problem of Covid and, for many families it is will be a more lonely time. Some of us are not spending time with families that we normal would see. And

I have been hearing from several parents asking for help with remote learning issues. The problems the kids are having should be expected: Masks are covering the teacher’s mouth so lipreading is not possible Masks, especially those close to the mouth are really distorting the speech signal The signal coming through the computer is further distorted When the teacher turns

As we know, most children with hearing loss find themselves in a classroom with no other children with hearing loss. They may pass other kids with hearing loss when they go to the audiologist, but they may not have many friends with hearing loss. While mainstream learning gives these kids amazing opportunities to be exposed to typical language, build literacy

This week’s Hearing Journal published an article by The Vanderbilt group (Thompson, Benitez-Berra and Tharpe) talking about the value of remote microphone systems for home use for children with hearing loss. I was delighted to see this article. This is something I have been pushing for a long time. The number or words a child hears is directly related to

There is no doubt that children with hearing loss need educational audiology services in schools. There is also no doubt that there are not sufficient educational audiologists out there to meet the needs of the kids. As school budgets get cut, special needs kids have their needs cut. Some school districts share educational audiology services through cooperative services. Some consult

I have been teaching some online courses in Australia and Singapore this last week. I have been talking about the Medial Consonant Test, developed by Rich Tyler at the University of Iowa in the early days of cochlear implants. At that time, candidates for implantation were adults who had long term profound hearing loss. The test was developed to help

There has been a lot of research over the years about the relationship of hours of use of speech perception scores and hours of use of hearing aids and cochlear implants. Now we have some more data. It confirms that longer wear time is critical. Work by the Boy’s Town group has shown that children who wear hearing aids 10

Everyone with hearing loss or who works with children with hearing loss is aware that the mask problem during this pandemic is a nightmare. No matter how good you are at hearing with technology, masks are a problem. They muffle the speech signal and they eliminate the possibility of lipreading. Anyone with hearing loss has difficulty managing communicating with people

Anyone who works with children with hearing loss should be a member of the AG Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. This is perhaps my favorite meeting to attend. AG Bell is a group that has as members audiologists, speech language pathologists, listening and spoken language specialists, teaches of the deaf and most important, families of children