Hearing Aids
Yesterday we drove to Charlottesville to get Christopher’s hearing aids, and to talk to a speech therapist. Christopher doesn’t seem to mind the aids, but then he doesn’t seem to notice them either. Hopefully after wearing them for a month or so he’ll begin to notice more sounds…
We spent a long time talking to a speech therapist about therapy options. Dorothy and I feel that we should get Christopher into “auditory-verbal” therapy. We had already decided that we wanted him to have every opportunity in a primarily hearing world, but our discussions with the therapist reinforced this decision.
First, kids who do “total communication”–i.e. sign language plus lip reading plus auditory plus speech–actually don’t do all of them equally well. Instead they do worse in all categories than if they focused on learning one communication method. Second, kids who do only auditory-verbal actually end up learning to lip read on their own anyway, so they are better off than kids who focus on lip reading at the cost of learning to use sounds.
This webpage described A/V therapy, describing a study in Missouri that the speech therapist told us about. It also describes the qualifications necessary to become certified in A/V therapy. The therapist told us that there are only about 300 certified therapists in the world. This means that we’ll be driving once a week to Charlottesville, Richmond, or Norfolk. We’re hoping to find someone in Newport News who can help Christopher, so that we don’t have to drive 1-2 hours each way every week.