What You Can Do to Help Children Communicate Effectively Despite Hearing Loss
The little ones are slowly growing up, exploring the world around them—and looking for answers to their questions. However, a child’s voice is often difficult for people with hearing loss to understand. What can you do? And what can children do to ensure that, despite your hearing loss, you’ll be willing to listen and provide answers to their discoveries?
For grandparents, the time they spend with their grandchildren is especially precious. They prepare their favorite meals, stock up on candy, and come up with ideas for activities to do together when the little ones come to visit. But children’s voices aren’t just high-pitched—they’re also soft. For people with hearing loss who have a classic high-frequency hearing loss, this combination makes it particularly difficult to understand them.
It’s not just the grandparents who suffer when their important connection with their grandchildren is hindered by hearing loss—the children also want to have lively conversations with Grandma and Grandpa. To ensure nothing stands in the way of cheerful conversations, Jana Verheyen, an audio coach and hearing aid user herself, offers the following tips:
“What’s that in your ear, Grandma?”
Children aren’t afraid to touch things: They marvel at hearing aids, listen with interest as they’re explained—and then move on to something more exciting. However, if you wear hearing aids, you should take a closer look at them. That’s because, to achieve optimal speech understanding, your hearing care professional relies on as detailed feedback as possible.
To do this, go about your daily life actively listening with your hearing aids, have plenty of conversations—including with your grandchildren—and tell your hearing care professional what you’ve been able to understand better than before and which words or letters you’re still having trouble with. Over time, the brain gets used to the volume, which can sometimes feel uncomfortable at first. Provided, of course, that you practice diligently—for example, with your grandchildren.
“Grandma? — When are we going to the zoo?”However, no hearing aid can fully replace the human ear. So if Grandma and Grandpa can no longer hear well and even the technologyhas reached its limits, this should be discussed openly. Once the grandchildren know exactly how they can contribute to a successful conversation, putting it into practice is often no problem. They quickly realize that they’ll only get helpful answers if Grandma and Grandpa have understood them. The following three points can help you with this:
- Unlike people with normal hearing, those with hearing loss must focus their attention on the speaker to understand them. So if the children call your name beforehand and wait until you’re “all ears,” that helps a lot.
- Children often look at whatever they’re talking about. Explain to them that they should look directly at you instead. That way, less of what’s said gets lost.
- Although children may not be very good at speaking loudly, they can certainly speak clearly. Ask them to be more conscious of their pronunciation.
Many children are surprisingly good at adapting to these requests—though they may need a reminder every now and then. Above all, though, they enjoy interacting with their grandparents!
Jana Verheyen provides counseling and coaching to people with hearing lossin Hamburg. To help people with hearing loss across Germany actively address their hearing situation, she has developed a holistic hearing training program. Learn more here.
