KidsAudiologist

Families who have a child with a mild, moderate or unilateral deafness frequently report that their child’s needs are poorly understood. This is often because the effect of their hearing loss may be more subtle than for those children with a more severe hearing loss. For example a mainstream teacher will find the child can hear them fine when working one-to-one with the child and not appreciate that the they can’t hear voices from further away and when there is background noise. This means that children have very reduced opportunities to benefit from hearing what is going on around them – incidental learning – and are therefore more likely to show delays in speech, language, educational, & social development than their normally hearing peers. Sadly, due to funding and capacity issues, local specialist support resources are often prioritised towards those children with more severe hearing losses so that training and awareness in schools may be low. Parents understanding and advocating for their child’s needs becomes even more important.

In 2010, NDCS was awarded a 2 year grant from the Department for Education under the SEN and Disability “Improving Outcomes” theme. We have been working with parents and professionals, providing specialist information and support on key barriers to achievement and to specific groups with a significant attainment gap. One strand of this work that I’ve been involved with has been to provide new information resources for parents that are available free to download – ‘Mild deafness’ and ‘Unilateral deafness’. This weekend I was involved in developing our first weekend for families of children who have a mild, moderate or unilateral deafness. All the deaf children were between 3 and 7 years old and they and their siblings appeared to have a great time occupied in the children’s activities sesssions. Parents attended sessions sharing their experiences, and heard from a young adult role model who grew up with moderate hearing loss in both ears. They also attended information sessions on audiology, technology, education, and NDCS events and services. 12 families attended and for 10 of them it was the first time they or their children had ever attended an NDCS event. Many had been told or held the perception that their child wasn’t ‘deaf enough’ to access specialist services, Disability Living Allowance, resources that help children develop listening skills, and even NDCS. A few families had shown an interest in learning sign language to help communication at times when their hearing aids couldn’t be used and to mix with other deaf children, but many had been poorly advised including that it would have a negative impact on their child’s spoken language development. This may have been one dimension of why families often hadn’t persued joining local groups and meeting other families with deaf children. Most of the children had never met another child that uses hearing aids and it was a real joy watching them playing together and making new friends ‘like them’ over the weekend. I believe the parents have all gone away feeling more confident that they understand their child’s needs and will be better able to make informed choices on behalf of and with their child.

So if you have a child with a mild, moderate or unilateral deafness remember that “NDCS uses the word ‘deaf’ to refer to all levels of hearing loss” and that all of our current services and events are open to you.