Our 10yo son is hard of hearing.
When he was about four months old, the pediatrician suggested that we have his hearing tested, based on the fact that he did not respond to environmental noise very well. Up to that point, we had chalked his problems up to several environmental issues, including the fact that he had a very noisy older sister (so he had learned to ignore noises that didn’t involve him), and the fact that he was growing up in a multi-lingual setting. (I was teaching French in a French and Italian university department, so when he came to work with me, he was more likely to hear French or Italian than English. His babysitter was the wife of a fellow grad student who was French and spoke very little English, so he heard much more French than English most days. At home, we pretty much spoke only English) The fact that he was being exposed to so many different languages seemed like a logical reason for him not to understand any of them very well.
I took him to his first hearing test convinced that he could hear normally, and the test was just to prove the doctor wrong. He completely failed the hearing test in the sound booth, so they scheduled him for an ABR at a children’s hospital about an hour away. He also completely failed that one, which showed no hearing at all in one ear, and severe loss in the other.
We had ear tubes put in, and that improved his hearing to the point that hearing aids would be effective. He got his first hearing aid when he was about a year old, but it took another year or so to get a complete pair for him to use.
In going through this odyssey with my son, I discovered that it is not unusual for parents and other adults to believe that if a child can hear at all that the child can also hear perfectly, which is far from being the case. The most common home hearing test I heard when we first started this trek was to call to the child through a closed door. If the child heard you, apparently his hearing was “fine” and there was nothing to worry about.
For these reasons, it is not uncommon to hear about people who have grown up with significant hearing loss without anyone (including the affected individual) knowing that there is a problem. Children are remarkably resilient in learning language, and they will learn to rely on lip reading, facial expression, hand gestures, etc. to understand the adults around them, even if they can’t quite hear all the sounds the speaker is using. Other sounds, like birds chirping or thunder, really don’t affect them at all, so they may simply go for years without being aware that they are supposed to hear those sounds. This is why hearing problems were often not diagnosed until well into elementary school, if not later.
Even minor hearing loss can make it difficult for a child to learn to speak correctly, since there are so many nearly inaudible sounds in any given human language, and many of those sounds are also invisible to someone who relies on mouth movements to understand the speaker. (/t/ and /s/ are virtually silent sounds, although they can normally be seen. Glottal stops and /k/, though, are not only silent, but invisible.)
Our son relies on hearing aids to get anything close to “normal” hearing, but he still has significant language problems. We actually had to teach him where to use /s/ and “ed” at the ends of words, since these sounds tend to be swallowed at the end of the word in American English, and he never heard them. His speech is rather garbled, too, despite years of speech therapy. We are in the habit of looking at him when we talk to him, and enunciating words very clearly and carefully, but it often takes teachers weeks to get used to the idea that not only will he not hear them all the time, but he will often be completely clueless that there was something he was supposed to hear that he missed because he (or the teacher) was looking in the wrong direction at the time.
We do not know why he has hearing problems, and we have pretty much given up trying. We did start seeing a new ENT who felt that the problems could be corrected surgically. One of our son’s eardrums was little more than lace after his most recent tube came out, so he needed eardrum replacement surgery anyway. While the surgeon was fixing the eardrum, he also looked at the middle ear to see if there were obvious problems, but found nothing correctable.
In the US today, it is common practice to screen newborns for hearing problems before they even leave the hospital, making stories like these much less common than they have been in the past. Our son was born only six months before the hospital he was born in started screening infants, in fact.
