Help Your Hearing-Impaired Child

Most parents of children with significant hearing loss are warned to expect lower than average school performance in a public school setting. Early childhood educators often predict that such children will lag behind their hearing peers.

That concern is what made me teach my hearing impaired child to read before starting school. Today, he is a voracious reader with an immense vocabulary. He speed reads at a rate that would put most adults I know (including me) to shame. What makes his achievement so incredible is that he's now reading at least six grade levels above the expected and excelling at school with the same severe degree of hearing loss he had when we started the journey.

He loves Greek mythology, historical fiction and just about every work that has ever been put into print. When reading material runs low, he writes; penning his own stories as effortlessly as he would maneuver a video games' controls.

There is no doubt that he's gifted, but that's not the point of this post. The real point is: if I'd listened to all the experts' predictions, he'd probably be just scraping by in school. His abilities might never have developed - at least, not this early.

Let me put this in context: most, if not all, of what the audiologists and ENT's will say is medically accurate; there's no point being in denial about a disability. If they say your child will always need to wear hearing aids because of nerve deafness then that's the way it's going to be. What you need to watch out for are the predictions regarding your child's future performance in the real world.

Special educators and other experts who will work with your child are trained to deal with children of various abilities and this experience, while often invaluable, can also prejudice their assessment of your child and lead to lower than appropriate expectations. Since performance generally mirrors expectations, if educators expect less than he is capable of, that's exactly what he's going to give.

That was the reason my son, who, by the age of two could name every animal in the zoo, would sit placidly while early learning professionals pointed out familiar animals, told him their names and asked him to repeat them. Naturally, if they had pointed out the animals and asked him to name them, he would have! Had I not repeatedly intervened in the process, I believe he would have been conditioned for under achievement in school.

This principle can be applied to all children: the deaf and hearing-impaired, as well as the hearing. Parents have to be actively involved in educating their kids so that their full, potential can be realized. No matter how well-trained the professional, a good parent knows his or her child best.

That's not to say expert opinion should be ignored, but that expectations should be tailored to the child's actual ability rather than to what a professional has been trained to expect. A good professional will seek your input in assessing what your child is capable of in a natural setting, rather than relying on what some office assessment or study predicts, based on his level of disability.

Even when your child is accurately assessed, you may be faced with the opposite conundrum: difficulty in accessing special education and appropriate resources simply because your child is not falling behind his peers! Once my son's abilities had been established, that was the hurdle we faced.

The expert advice here again is to demand the child's right to a free and appropriate education, attend countless IEP meetings, be familiar with the laws and enlist the help of parent advocates. That was all well and good for me, but the pace of that process is painfully slow and since children grow and develop at a rapid pace, relying too heavily on the school system might have placed my hearing-impaired son at a distinct disadvantage.

Having been warned to expect these challenges, I had taught my child to read well before elementary school using a proprietary reading program that was really interesting and simple to use. The way I figured it, since children with hearing loss have to work so much harder to listen, reading should be comparatively easy. My strategy worked for him and the rest is history.

While countless school officials pushed paper, administered tests and pondered the relative merits of various assistive listening devices, my son devoured every book I could lay my hand on. The result? I'm still having to fight to keep every intervention I've won for him so far, but the battles are sweet because the war's already been won.