This time of year, many parents ask me about how to choose the best toys for their child with hearing loss. Here are a few tips:
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Tips for CI Surgery Day
You’ve had the pre-operative tests, filed (and/or battled) with your insurance provider, and selected the device. The big day is finally here… it’s time for CI surgery day. Here are some tips to make the big day go as smoothly as possible:
Step Away From the Prize Box: Building Internal Motivation in Children
During my undergraduate and graduate training, I had whole lectures, book chapters, and seminars devoted to the topic of behavior management and reinforcement — how to use primary reinforcers (food), token economies (how many check marks should equal a sticker? how many stickers to a lollipop?), prizes, rewards, and more.
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Mapping a Cochlear Implant
Mapping (or MAPping) is the term for programming a cochlear implant to the specifications and needs of its user. While any cochlear implant user, or parent, caregiver, or family member of a CI user, has probably attended countless mapping appointments with an audiologist, the process is often confusing or poorly understood.
How to Read an Audiogram
I often say that becoming a parent of a child with hearing loss is like being drafted onto a team for a sport you’ve never played and expected to be the MVP. Almost overnight, you’re bombarded with technical jargon, communication options, opinions, appointments, and waves of emotion. Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed?
Phonological Awareness for Children with Hearing Loss
Phonological Awareness is the ability to detect, identify, and manipulate sounds and syllables in words.
Phonological Awareness skills are CRUCIAL predictors of a child’s reading success.
Children with hearing loss CAN develop phonological skills through listening.
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Let’s Talk About Behavior
Discipline/behavior management is often the most difficult topic for professionals and parents alike. Children do not come with a user’s manual, and “bad” behavior can drive adults up a wall. Below are a few of my thoughts as well as some tried and true techniques that I have used to tame even the most trantrum-prone toddlers.
The Catch-Up Game: Children Who Receive Cochlear Implants “Late”
Lots of attention in the CI world is focused on children implanted young — often before one year of age. Research shows us that children who receive implants before two years of age have a significant advantage in the development of auditory, speech, and language skills (see Svirsky et, al, 2004 and Nicholas and Geers, 2007).
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Crafts, Concepts, and Critical Elements
Arts and crafts projects are about far more the cutting, pasting, and bedazzling until your fingers are sore — they’re also a great way to work on critical elements and basic concepts (see explanations of these terms below).
What to Do While Waiting for Your Baby’s Cochlear Implant
Currently, the United States Food and Drug Administration recommends cochlear implants for children twelve months of age or older. While many surgeons are operating on children under this age (remember, it is just a guideline, not a rule or law, and research has shown no increased safety concerns in operations before twelve months; see Dettman et. al, 2007), the possibility of detecting a hearing loss at birth still means that parents will have at least a few months of “wait time” between hearing loss identification and cochlear implantation for children with profound hearing loss. This does not have to be wasted time!
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Elizabeth A. Rosenzweig 