When routine checkups missed our daughter’s hearing loss, we realized how families navigating an invisible disability can fall through the cracks. So we started to build the tools to help them.
Inclusive Stories for Children With Hearing Loss
My firsthand experience with hearing, speech, and language development challenges, both personally and as a parent, helped shape my writing.
Brain Responses to Voice Pitch Offer Clues to Hearing Difficulties in Children
These findings show that even with appropriate amplification via hearing aids, children with hearing loss still have trouble processing certain aspects of sound, particularly the basic pitch of voices. These objectively measurable brain responses may explain why children with hearing loss struggle more in noisy or echoey environments.
Simple Strategies to Boost Language Skills in Children With Hearing Loss
As a teacher of the deaf in New York City, I can see that as easy as it was for me to “pick up” language, for our children with hearing loss this is not the case. It’s quite the opposite. Children with hearing loss miss out on learning language incidentally on a daily basis, even with their hearing devices.
Hearing Our Way
Ten years ago, I embarked on a mission to support children with hearing loss. These kids are often one of the few, if not the only, children with hearing loss in their mainstream schools. My goal was to connect them with other kids like themselves and introduce them to inspiring role models who also have hearing loss.
Minimizing Noise to Maximize Student Success
Making tiny adjustments creates a more favorable learning environment for all learners. We can minimize background noise and improve classroom acoustics to enhance clear communication and understanding.
Watching ‘Star Wars’ With Common Sense
To determine a noise rating, we could analyze the frequency of explosions—say, how many blasts per minute, on average—and the overall sound level of a film.
Why Children With Autism May Experience Auditory Sensory Overload
The successful navigation of complex everyday environments with multiple sensory inputs—such as restaurants, busy streets, and other social settings—relies on the brain’s ability to organize the barrage of information into discrete perceptual objects on which cognitive processes, such as selective attention, can act.
Measuring Children’s Ability to Hear Speech in Different Competing Backgrounds
Young children spend much of their day listening in noise. However, it is clear that, compared with adults, infants and children are highly susceptible to interference from competing background sounds.
A Lesson in Resilience
One of my earliest memories is answering the telephone for my mother. She taught me to do this when I was only 2 1/2 years old. I’d say to the caller, “Take a message for Mommy?” Then I repeated what the caller said, my mother responded, and we handed the phone back and forth as the conversation went along.