Yet care must not only be taken right after birth. Viral or bacterial infections in childhood generally bring with them the risk of hearing loss. Thus it is also important to observe children’s hearing as they grow up. Katie Morford knows just how suddenly and unexpectedly “acquired hearing loss” can appear. Her daughter’s increasingly noisy behavior was a cause for concern for the mother from San Francisco. Rosie started speaking ever more loudly and her friends frequently asked her to play more quietly. At the same time she had increasing difficulty understanding her parents and often asked them to repeat  themselves. A typical problem was also being among lots of people. Situations in which there are great swathes of background noise in which individual voices get lost can be irritating and tiring even for adults. Here, the particular danger is that a child feels excluded, because it doesn’t understand anything in the great buzzing and humming all around it. “I think socially she sometimes couldn’t keep up. It was especially difficult for her when we were in public places” recalls Rosie’s mother.

The fact that she had suffered from a series of inflammatory ear infections led Rosie’s parents and doctors to suspect that it was these that were causing the hearing loss and it was only temporary. “After the many almost chronic infections, it was difficult to realize that her hearing problems were permanent. We thought for a long time that it was the fluid in her ear and didn’t even consider the possibility that her hearing loss could be permanent”, explains Katie Morford, looking back. She never thought that her daughter would need a hearing device one day. Then, when she was seven and a half, Rosie was diagnosed with moderate hearing loss by her ENT doctor, which was very likely the result of, or had been accelerated by, a middle-ear infection. The doctors recommended hearing systems, and since then the colorful devices have been part of Rosie’s daily life.

Despite several problems that her disability brings with it, Rosie has adopted a very Californian attitude to her hearing loss and has made something special of it: When she got her hearing system, she stood up in front of her class at school and explained to her curious classmates what it was and how it worked. “Once she was even invited to a kindergarten group where the teacher was reading a book about a child with hearing loss. I noticed that she was hand ling it well. She has really embraced it and made it part of herself”, comments Katie Morford, describing her daughter’s positive attitude. This easygoing approach to a hearing system, we might like to think, definitely has something over the attitude of some adults towards hearing loss. Rosie could be a role model for dismantling (self-) stigmatizing mindsets.

Martin Ernst