Hearing and Kids

This week’s blog is written by Gael Hannan. Gael is an adult with a progressive hearing loss which began when she was a child. I asked her to write this blog because she writes very well about her experiences learning to advocate for herself as a young adult. As those of you who read my blog know, I feel strongly

Infants and children in strollers The primary thing that concerns me most about cell phones is that they seem to interfere with communicating with children. Walking down the street with a little one in a stroller or in a pack on your body is a wonderful time to talk to them. Talk about what you see, what you hear, where

Eddie the Elephant’s Magical Ear by Suanne Picerno is a book about an elephant who gradually loses his hearing. Actually, he loses his ear and cannot hear. He is sad he cannot hear birds, frogs etc. He then found his ear and something made a little noise beneath the ear. An itsy-bitsy spider was under the ear. The spider has

Editor’s Note: This post is written by my good friend Joseph Smaldino. Dr. Smaldino received his PhD in audiology from the University of Florida and his research areas are hearing aids, speech perception and audiologic rehabilitation, but he has focused for the last 20 years on the effects of classroom acoustics on listening and learning.  He served on the American National

For some reason, the cochlear implant guidelines for young children has always been behind the times. For a long time children with a profound hearing loss could be implanted at 1 year but a child with a severe hearing loss could not be implanted before age 2. Don’t children who are 18 months old need to hear? Audiologists and ENT’s

Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of Chicago Medical School wrote the wonderful book Thirty Million Words – Building a Child’s Brain, She is Director of the 30 million words initiative at the University of Chicago Medical School – a program to build language and build the brains of children who are growing up in poverty who

When children read books they want to find books that they can identify with. Children of color want to read books in which there are children of color. Girls want to read books in which there are strong girls (like the Mighty Girl) series. Children with hearing loss who wear hearing aids and cochlear implants want to read books about

The world of audiology has changed dramatically since I started in this field in 1963. I was fortunate to have a wonderful mentor, David Luterman, who helped me to understand the role of grief for audiologists and for the families we work with. The work of Kris English, Johnnie Sexton, and others has made it clear than many audiologists do

Spring time and a bunch of newly minted people will graduate as audiologists. Some will even be pediatric audiologists. (Hurrah – we need as many as we can get!! ) What does it take to become a good (or great) pediatric audiologist? Pediatric audiology is different than adult audiology. For both you need to understand  all the basics of testing

I have recently started taking piano lessons again after many years and am having a wonderful time. While I have continued to sing and to play guitar but the piano is different. It is reminding me of how important music is to brain development. The Brain Volts Lab at Northwestern run by the brilliant clinician Nina Kraus has done a