Reply to Child diagnosed with mild bilateral hearing loss

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Reply to "Child diagnosed with mild bilateral hearing loss - any advice?"

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[quote=Anonymous]Honestly, I would be extremely concerned about a practice which dismissed a failed hearing test with nothing more than "we'll test next year". I would not want to continue working with a practice who essentially let a kid with hearing loss languish for an entire year without help.

IME, hearing difficulty at a young age has a large impact on language development.  My DC had a lot of difficulty with hearing from birth to 6 years due to constant ear infections.  IMO, our Medstar Georgetown surgeon failed to recognize that DC's adenoids were too large to allow sinus drainage resulting in 2 ear surgeries in under 6 months.  (This despite being advised of family history of such.)

DC probably did not hear well for a substantial portion of his 0-3 years.  In retrospect, I wish that someone had advised us that he should probably be getting speech therapy and be monitored much more closely in speech and language development during that time.  We could have avoided a lot problems that developed in preschool and ES in terms of how language impacts academics -- spelling, reading, etc.

I also wish we had looked more closely at the River School.  I thought at the time since he didn't have a cochlear implant, he would not qualify as one of the hearing impaired children in the classroom, but that kind of language-rich environment built to be inclusive toward hearing impaired kids would have been very good for him.

FWIW, your description of having difficulty hearing against background noise is something my DC experiences also.  If your DC is in public school, please ask public school to evaluate for an IEP (or if not 504 plan).  Every public school system has one or more county-wide specialists in hearing impairment.  There is a simple system that can be used in the classroom - the teacher wears a mic and the student wears an earpiece - to boost the teacher's voice so the student doesn't have to strain so hard to hear.  It is cognitively exhausting to work so hard to hear and leaves little energy or attention to learn other things in the classroom.

At age 7, I would also seek out a comprehensive baseline neuropsychological to make sure that hearing loss isn't impacting other things like attention, spelling, reading, math, etc.  Even though you say he has learned to read, you really need a professional to assess whether he is reading at a level commensurate with his IQ and whether speed, fluency, decoding and comprehension are all at grade level.  Sometimes bright kids can compensate in reading even though they have big holes in one area of reading that are problematic.  These compensation strategies usually fall apart as they age and reading becomes more difficult.

There are also accommodations that could be considered -- times in the classroom when he could put on noise blocking headphones during group work, having preferred seating, etc. [/quote]

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