Hearing Blog

Children Can Benefit From Hearing Aids

As much as the thought saddens us, hearing loss can affect infants from birth. As much as 840 newborn babies are born with hearing loss every year. This makes it imperative that children have accessibility to healthcare that involves hearing health. Hearing loss affects 34 million children across the globe, and this condition can adversely impact their personal, academic, and professional development as they grow.

Hearing loss negatively impacts the earning capacity of individuals, which can stop them from reaching their full potential. As children grow with a hearing impairment, their ability to communicate, socialize, and excel as students becomes challenging.

Having untreated hearing loss as a child significantly impacts speech and language skills. Over time, even their cognitive abilities such as memory may become impacted since they are not exposed to speech and other environmental sounds. With age, this can lead to a double increased risk of developing dementia and cognitive decline.

Even learning to read or write can become a challenge for children with hearing loss, which can significantly hamper their progress in school. Some children may even fall behind academically as a result, and may even encounter psychological problems due to problems like bullying from students and harsh treatment from teachers.

Apart from academic problems, children with hearing loss are also at risk of physiological ailments as they grow. Hearing loss can increase the chances of developing other several ailments, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other health risks.

Children with hearing loss are at an increased risk of sustaining injuries due to falling. Hearing loss can lead to loss of equilibrium, resulting in falls. A hearing impaired child may suffer a lifelong disability due to serious falls that may take place, which may result in permanent bone damage.

It is important to protect our children as best as we can from the woes of hearing loss. We can prevent the significant problems resulting from hearing loss by actively engaging in detection as well as treatment of hearing loss in children as early as possible. Hearing tests should become a part of medical check-ups, and facilities like speech therapy as well as sign language classes should be more widely available for hearing impaired children.

Hearing tests are already a mandatory part of tests that are conducted on newborn children. These can help detect any hearing loss that may be present at the time of birth. Early treatment and the use of hearing aids provides a hearing impaired child with the best possible future they can hope for by ensuring the hearing loss does not interrupt with their true potential and the person they are truly capable of being.