My boyfriend has a 3 year old son who was late on his speech, so we decided to take him to see a doctor. He has seen a neurologist and taken a BAER test which indicated that he had profound hearing loss in the left ear and severe in the right. He is very smart and his motor skills have always seemed high for his age. Were just confused on what are all the options it could be… we have been referred to the children’s hospital, but it wont be for a while. If any one has dealt with this or has any advice we would appreciate it. We’re just kind of lost on where do we go from here. (When he was born he passed his hearing test.) Also he seems to have behavior problems, and the docs say its just his age, but we feel it could be more. He has really bad anger problems and is very moody. Could that be because he can’t hear or should we look into other things like ADHD or bipolar syndrome?
Based on the basic information provided, my thoughts are that your 3 year old boy’s anger and moodiness is related more to his hearing loss and communication frustrations. His behaviors may look like he has attention difficulties (i.e., easily distracted, impulsive, daydreaming). However, these behavior may because he cannot hear and uses his vision for information. Sometimes parents have a difficult time differentiating whether the child’s hearing loss is contributing to disobedient behavior, or, whether the child’s attention and willfulness is creating communication difficulties.
In most cases, parents need to address communication issues before assuming defiant behavior. For example, parents must make eye contact instead of talking to the child from a location where the child does not see the parent. There are many more communication strategies and tips for parents. At this time, seeking out professionals who work with children who have ommunication disorders is a suggestion, especially if your community does not have psychologists who have expertise in working with families who have deaf members. You also might check to see if there is a local chapter of Hands & Voices or contact the American Society for Deaf Children for advice.
I am looking for listening comprehension programs for elementary HH/CI students. Again, I find checklists but few programs for what we used to call ‘auditory training’. All are either for young, early implanted (Dave Sindrey for example) or teenagers (music and phone use). I have used the SPICE program… but is that all?
I am delighted to see that you are investigating different listening comprehension programs. There are several out there and more that are being developed all the time. It is a bit interesting that many of the materials are now being hosted by the Implant Corporations, but in a way it makes sense. They employ the people who do the work and creative aspects. I know that the cost of developing materials is very high and the market is relatively sparse compared to other products, so this may be why Implant Corps can absorb the cost. (example– you mentioned Sindry, and his work is now available through these websites). Here is a resource list of my favorites for elementary age:
Hearing Rehabilitation Foundation materials—many are developed by Geoff Plant and are very good http://www.hearf.org/Materials.html
Alphacats
Analytika
Commtrac
Hear at Home
Speech Stuff
Rhythm, Rhyme & Song
Speech Rhymes
Step by Step
Syntrex
Goldberg Stout, G., & Windle J. Developmental Approach to Successful Listening II (DASL)
Tye-Murray, N. (2002). Conversation Made Easy. Three 6-set CD-ROM Training Programs. Central Institute for the Deaf, St. Louis, MO.
Have you tried the CI company’s websites? Each company offers a multitude of materials ranging from reproducible materials, listening logs, listening activities etc, which are not just telephone use or music, and many are free to donload. Activities are appropriate for CI users or Hearing Aid users. See, for example the Listening Room by Advanced bionics http://www.hearingjourney.com/Listening_Room/preview.cfm?langid=1
Cochlear Corporation offers their HOPE website which has so many resources, some to purchase, some are training seminars, some are apps for IPad (it is WONDERFUL) http://hope.cochlearamericas.com/
MedEL offers the BRIDGE http://www.medel.com/us/rehabilitation/ and this site again has items to purchase items to download for free.
*For many of these sites, you do need to register and login in, but that is a small price to pay for the wealth of information you receive. Do register and you will see so many listening tasks and activities.
My sister is deaf and she needs a job. How can we help her and other deaf boys and girls get jobs?
There are many areas to address, such as getting training or education in the field you are interested in, developing a resume, practicing interview skills, and so forth. “Networking” is also one of the best way to find a job. Networking is making contact with people you know and letting people know what your skills, experience, and strengths are. Research has shown that 75-80% of people find jobs through networking.
Job-seekers can network with everyone, everywhere, and all the time. It is important for job seekers to network with friends, relatives, businesspeople, doctors, clergy, clubs, teachers…etc. It can be scary and a challenge for deaf individuals to know what to say. Here are some suggestions, “I’m looking for a job, do you know anyone whom I could contact?, can you think of 5 companies where I should apply?, do you know other people who could be helpful?”.
Networking can help you grow in your area of interest and as a person. Every time you go up to a stranger, talk to them, and get through that little wall of fear, you’re boosting your self-confidence. That confidence is what people see in you even before you communicate.
Once a child has been identified as deaf or hard of hearing, what is generally next for his/her parents? Does New York State have a deaf mentoring system in place? What does early intervention (EI) look like for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids in this state? Where can parents turn for information?
Here in New York, after a child is identified as having a hearing loss, the audiology clinic typically provides the family information about contacting Early Intervention for the county in which the family resides. Whether there is a mentoring program or not depends on who the EI service provider is. There is no formal mentoring program run through EI for hearing parents of deaf children.
Parents are approved for EI based on their child’s “diagnosis” and need. They work with an EI service coordinator to develop an IFSP (Individual Family Service Plan). Services are approved and parents are guided through the list of service providers with which EI has subcontracts for providing services. Here in Rochester, for example, the Rochester School for the Deaf is one of those agencies.
There is no chapter of a parent support group such as Hands & Voices in this part of New York, but there may be in other areas.
My almost 3-year-old daughter has a moderate to almost severe hearing loss in both ears (55-65 db). She uses ASL and also speaks while signing though her signing is more developed. She wears two hearing aids, since she was 1 year old. We use ASL at home (I am deaf myself) and also speak, at the same time. She is receiving services at a regional program and attends school a few times a month with other deaf children. This will soon increase to 2 mornings a week when she turns 3. We decided to add another school/Childcare, 2 mornings a week, that has all hearing students and the staff all knows a few signs while one staff knows more ASL though not fluent. That one staff isn’t always present. My concern is this: I believe she would benefit from more sign support either through an interpreter or a family friend (due to cost) to help serve as a bridge. She sometimes appears lost while looking around the classroom. She has had a difficult adjustment period though they have recently added more sign information and that has helped. Her regional teacher feels this school provides more auditory development for her, to hear and speak. There is a concern she may cling to whoever signs and not socialize much. I question whether anyone truly understands how much she catches with her aids. I wonder if it is best to provide extra sign support in the beginning and then taper off as needed when her abilities are clearly known. People have said she is only at the “other” school about 7 hours each week and all other times, she gets ASL. Will providing more sign support in this environment hinder her hearing / speaking abilities later?
The short answer to your question about whether or not sign language support will interfere with eventual spoken language development is an unqualified – NO. There is no evidence that signing interferes with speech if speech is feasible for a child and supported by her auditory and oral-motor abilities. How lucky for your daughter that she has fluent adult models for both ASL and English at home – and at the same time no less! The bigger issue seems to be what kinds of information your child has access to in the preschool class where less signing is available from the adults and virtually no signing is available from the children. Given your comment about her “difficult adjustment,” your child may benefit from more “scaffolding” for both social interaction and vocabulary learning in the new preschool setting. Providing more help in the beginning meets her immediate needs – always a good idea in the long run. It would be unwise to suppose that she is able to function in one modality – hearing, at one school and another modality – vision, in the other. Though she will almost certainly acquire two languages, she is one child with a singular need for optimal, that is to say dual, inputs in every linguistic encounted.
Satisfying social interaction is the most natural and powerful motivation for language learning. If socializing is a goal – and it should be at age 3, then having supportive adults to help navigate interactions with age peers is a good idea. This help could come from an interpreter or family friend as you suggest, if their role is clearly defined and reinforced by the other adults in the classroom. If learning language through listening and auditory skills are a goal, but the context is a preschool with hearing children who cannot sign, some kind of adult mediation is certainly warranted. Though always a risk when using interpreters, the signing adult need not be the sole source of either auditory or signed language input. Perhaps activities could be devised wherein the signing adult teaches a hearing age peer to be a partner in listening games. Similarly, the signing adults could serve as on-the-spot tutors for the hearing children to learn signs for key words that support spoken language vocabulary in the course of play-based interactions.
That your child is looking around confused, though distressing emotionally, is a good indicator that she knows that she does not know, and she is looking for a way in – an access modality. This sensitivity to needing language input is hard to teach, but something that her teachers can exploit every day. Given that the limits of her auditory-only reception are uncertain for now, and that she is looking for input on the hands, she should be given routine access to concurrent, or at the very least sequential, signed and spoken English whenever ASL is not being used. Routine access means that the speech she cannot perceive is supported by signs on the spot and the signs she knows are associated with spoken English words that will eventually become the basis of her ability to develop text literacy i.e., reading and writing.
How is it that deaf and blind children learn to physologically communicate? In other words, how does one part of the brain compensate for another in the deaf and blind?
The best answer to the question comes from Dr. Jude Nicholas of the Resource Center for the Deafblind and Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway. Dr. Nicholas has an excellent article on the Deafblind International Website http://www.deafblindinternational.org/PDF/Active%20Touch%20Article.pdf
In short, the answer involves the sense of touch ,including tactile sensation, tactile perception, and tactile cognition. Studies have demonstrated that individuals who are deafblind are more experienced in recognizing stimuli through active touch than are sighted-hearing individuals. This then leads to superior performance on tasks involving the tactile cognition tasks of tactile working memory and tactile memory. Individuals who are deafblind encode tactile spatial information more efficiently than do individuals who are sighted and hearing. Increased tactual experiences thus enables neuroplasticity or the reorganization of the nervous system.
I have a question about personal FM system compared with soundfield. Our school district says that our daughter 3 years old is too young to give accurate feedback on if the Fm is working properly so they do not advice us to use it. Our daughter has severe hearing loss, uses hearing aids both ears, but tests low average on language skills as of now. No other concerns. We will be transitioning into the school system soon. They have a self contained class room with soundfield but we feel that a regular setting is least restrictive for her and want to find out which system to ask for in that setting.
I am absolutely flummoxed at the school district’s position, and cannot think of one piece of evidence to support their recommendation. The FM is an excellent solution in this case. The personal FM has a ‘boot’ which fits onto the individual’s personal hearing aids. The teacher wears a microphone and transmitter, and the teacher’s voice is transmitted directly to the child’s hearing aid. The statement that a three-year old is not able to tell if the FM is working correctly makes no sense, because the child is wearing a hearing aid and the child either has the skills to indicate the hearing aid is working correctly or not. The same premise of operation will be at work with the FM system. Infants can use FM systems, infants wear hearing aids, CIs and we all learn to read their behavior to assess whether the system works correctly and eventually the child becomes an accurate reporter. I worked in a preschool classroom where all the 3-year olds used personal FM systems. The FM system can and should be given a “listening check” each day. The FM system will allow your child to be placed in a most appropriate environment. It will cut down on background noise and give her a ‘direct link” to the teacher’s voice, where a sound field system will not.
There are several websites that can inform the district personnel how to do daily listening tests on the hearing aid and the FM system.
http://www.pepnet.org/faq/faq02.asp
Need help in finding appropriate strategies for a 7th grader that has been diagnosed with ABNORMAL AUDITORY PERCEPTION. Would a 504 be appropriate or CST referral? His overall grades are not bad a solid B range however, on his standardized test scores were not proficient. Any suggestions??
I am not familiar with the use of the term “Abnormal Auditory Perception” in the auditory sense. I have heard the term used to describe a phenomena that is related to neurological insult or traumatic head injury in the context that the auditory centers in the brain “fire at random” and may yield an auditory hallucination type of experience, such that an old conversation is in a way “replayed” or “reheard”. I am thinking that the term you may be referring to can be called by one of these terms: Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) or Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), rather than Abnormal Auditory Perception. An Auditory Processing Disorder is when the actual ears or hearing parts of the ears work just fine. The child hears quiet sounds such as leaves rustling, whispers, etc. If a child is given a hearing test that tests the threshold ability of listening to sounds across all frequencies, they will typically do fine. In CAPD/APD, the problem arises in discerning what is said, especially if there is noise in the background. These children may exhibit a variety of classroom issues such as trouble following directions, or telling the difference between sounds that sound alike. These children tend to ask for lots of repeats and they may have trouble with spelling, reading and understanding the language of the classroom. They may do much better in classes where they do not have to rely on listening, or in classes that are “hands on”. For children with CAPD/APD, it is essential they have a full CAPD workup, and yes a Child Study Team evaluation will be very important. You will need to find a local audiologist who is able to do a CAPD test battery or a university clinic with a Communicative Disorders/Speech Pathology/Audiology program. As these middle school to high school years approach and classes become more “lecture based” accommodations may mean the difference between a very frustrated and lost student and one who is able to cope with listening and understanding information presented in the classroom.
One of my grandsons was born deaf. Although there is no history of deafness in the family, my daughter’s doctor said that her son’s condition is probably genetic. Can you explain?
This is a great question, since it is often believed that if something is genetic it has to be “running in the family.” Most parents, and even some health professionals, are surprised to learn that 50% of hearing loss has a genetic basis. However, a child can have a genetic-related hearing loss even if no one in the family has hearing loss. Therefore, it is very important that parents, like your daughter, follow through with referrals to a clinical geneticist—even as they are addressing their child’s hearing and communication issues. Learning more about the cause of your grandson’s hearing loss can help doctors understand the complete picture of his health. Most children with hearing loss do not have other health problems, but a few do. A referral to a genetics doctor may help find these problems so that your daughter and her family can make the best possible decisions about your grandson’s healthcare.
A new brochure, Hearing Loss, Genetics and Your Child has been designed both to connect families like yours with genetics professionals, and to prepare them for a genetics appointment. The brochure also answers other questions families may have, such as who will pay for genetic testing, and contains basic facts on genetics-related hearing loss. The brochure was developed by a team of medical geneticists, genetic counselors, audiologists, parent advocates, and health science information specialists led by Kathleen Arnos, PhD, FACMG, Professor of Biology and Genetics Program Director at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, whose career has been devoted to understanding genetics and hearing loss. It is being distributed by the National Coordinating Center for the Regional Genetic and Newborn Screening Services Collaboratives (NCC), housed at the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG), which funded its development.
Hearing Loss, Genetics and Your Child is available in printed and downloadable pdf formats. It is written in layperson’s terms and is available in both English and Spanish. It can be accessed electronically at no cost at www.nccrcg.org under the “Resources” tab. If you have any further questions about the hearing loss brochures, or would like to connect with the National Coordinating Center, you can contact either Matthew Tranter (mtranter@acmg.net) or Judith Benkendorf, MS, CGC (jbenkendorf@acmg.net) or by calling 301-718-9603.
Is it essential to address hearing loss before a child reaches the age of seven years?
Absolutely!! The ideal age for addressing hearing loss (effective parenting techniques, effective exposure to language, consideration of assistive listening devices, etc.) is from birth. Recent research has demonstrated that when deaf children are identified and receive early intervention services within the first six months of life, their language abilities are much more likely to fall within the normal range for hearing children by the time they enter school. Strategies for ensuring effective access to language, supporting social-emotional development, and all of the other issues noted above are essential as early as possible in order to ensure normal development…and providing them after the age at which hearing children are starting to aquire language definitely is not “normal.”
All of that said, “better late than never.” If those early opportunities have been missed, the situation calls for even more vigorous, concerted efforts by all involved.