This article is based on my own personal experience and should not diagnose you or any other child you know. If there are concerns about your child’s hearing or speech, please seek professional help.
What? I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that. What did you say? I can’t hear you.
I can’t hear you.
About 2 to 3 out of every 1,000 children in the United States are born with a detectable level of hearing loss in one or both ears, and more than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. Approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million) aged 18 and over report some trouble hearing.
I am a part of those 1,000 children.
I was only a few weeks premature. Not a few months or anything significant, I just decided to come as a present for my mom, being born on her birthday. I spent some time in Intensive Care Unit due to me having low oxygen levels at birth. After some time, I was released to go home with my parents. Fast-forward four years. I am in pre-kindergarten. My teacher mentioned that I might need to have my hearing tested because I wasn’t able to understand speech spoken at a normal hearing level.
The next week, we found out that I have a bilateral moderate sloping to profound sensorineural hearing loss. In other words--I can’t hear what I am supposed to hear. Both of my ears are broken. I can’t hear higher frequencies. I can hear (I am not deaf)… but not as well as everyone else. Actually, not even close. I couldn’t hear leaves being crunched under my feet when it was fall, I couldn’t hear the birds outside. I couldn’t hear running water, rain outside, the crackling of wood during a bonfire or in a fireplace. I couldn’t hear the ticking of a clock, either. I was missing so many extra noises that I didn’t even know existed. Not only was I missing the outdoor noises, I was missing speech. I couldn’t pick up on high frequencies sounds, like "s", "z", "ch", "th," just to name a few. So with that, came a speech impediment. I started speech therapy when I started kindergarten. Not many people realize how important the first few years of life are, linguistically.
Keep this in mind:
- By the end of 12 months, children might try imitating speech sounds, and try to say a few words, such as "dada," "mama" and "uh-oh", understand simple instructions, such as "Come here", and recognize words for common items, such as "shoe", turn and look in the direction of sounds.
- By the end of 18 months, children might recognize names of familiar people, objects and body parts, follow simple directions accompanied by gestures, and say as many as eight to 10 words.
- By the end of 24 months, children might use simple phrases, such as "more milk", ask one- to two-word questions, such as "Go bye-bye,” follow simple commands and understand simple questions, and speak at least 50 words.
Obviously, not every child is the same and every child develops at different rates. But when speech is either absent or highly distorted to where only the parents of the child can understand the child, there is a problem. And with me--there was a problem. I had no idea that the “s” sound even existed because my hearing loss would not allow for the high frequencies to be picked up by my ears; same thing with “z”, “ch” and a few other sounds.
At the age of 4, I received my first pair of hearing aids. At the age of 4 I was finally able to hear almost everything I was supposed to hear. I say almost because with the severity of my hearing loss, not every sound was going to be “restored.” Why get hearing aids? you ask. Receiving hearing aids helped my hearing tremendously. Everything is amplified. Everything is louder for me to be able to hear. If there was a chance I could hear more sounds than I did before, I am going to take that chance, or rather my parents took that chance knowing that I would never have completely normal hearing. Close, but not exact.
At 4 years of age, my life changed; My life change for the better. A hidden disability was finally found and corrected to the best of the ability of the professionals around me.
I have taken my “disability” and turned it into something more powerful than most people could ever imagine.
