For many people and their families, adjusting to điếc and receiving hearing rehabilitation is a difficult and long process.
No deaf is exactly the same, but there are some ways to better understand deaf.
First of all, we have to consider some general social and emotional impacts of living in deaf. First are the children and adolescents who grow up in the deaf, and then the adults who have acquired the deaf.
Today, the editor will show you how deaf affects growing children and adolescents, and what we can do to help them get better hearing rehabilitation.
Children and adolescents growing up in deaf
The most obvious consequence of growing up in deaf is that it is difficult to perceive the words of others, because hearing limitations directly affect one’s own vocabulary development ability and subsequent language ability.
Even a mild deaf will adversely affect the development of vocabulary and the understanding of minor changes in language. When language development is slow, it will have a series of effects on many aspects of children’s psychosocial development, including self-concept, emotional development, family attention and social abilities.
Self-concept
An individual’s self-concept is not innate, but is learned by absorbing the input, feedback and reaction of the people and the environment around it.
Children usually internalize these reactions without questioning and define themselves in the attitude of others.
Hearing-impaired children may develop relatively poor self-concepts, which may be caused by their negative reactions to communication difficulties, or they may be caused by different social views of máy trợ thính users.
Some early studies concluded that even mild deaf may be related to increased social and emotional dysfunction in school-age children.
Encouragingly, preschoolers seem unlikely to hold these negative and preconceived ideas, and teenagers may become more accustomed to and accept hearing aid.
However, generally speaking, if a hearing aid device appears on the ear, it may cause a negative reaction to the person who sees it. Their reaction may be perceived by the user of the hearing aid, which may affect the self-concept of the user of the hearing aid. result in negative effect. This is the so-called Hearing aid effect.
As practitioners or members of the hearing-impaired group, we must regard the society’s response to hearing aid as a problem that needs to be solved urgently. If this type of view is allowed to spread in the society, it will be a problem for the growing hearing-impaired. Children are an invisible influence.
Note: Hearing aid effect is a psychological response to the existence of a hearing aid, and a negative assumption of the user of the hearing aid.
Emotional development
Emotional development, to put it simply, is a person’s use of language to describe, explain and finally understand the abstraction of his emotions.
Due to the language barrier, the growing hearing impaired children may have limited experience in self-expression, so there will be delays in recognizing and understanding the emotions of themselves and others.
Studies have shown that, compared with children without deaf, children with deaf tend to be less accurate in recognizing the emotional state of others and have a poorer understanding of emotional vocabulary.
The understanding of emotional vocabulary is positively correlated with personal adaptability, so these findings strengthen our understanding of the contribution of communication to self-understanding.
Hoffman, Quittner, and Cejas (2015) proposed that if there is no active intervention, development defects in one field will have a cascading effect on other fields. When children cannot express their feelings, they cannot understand these feelings; failing to understand their own feelings will damage the development of empathy.
Family Concern
More than 95% of hearing impaired children were born in families with at least one hearing parent (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004). Most of these parents have little or no experience with DEAF, so the diagnosis of DEAF will be devastating news.
The emotional response experienced by most parents is consistent with the stages of the “grief cycle.”
The grief cycle includes a set of gradual emotional reactions, starting with shock because the information is not expected, and denial because the information is inconsistent with one’s own plans for the future. When the reality begins to sink, grieving parents may find themselves depressed or helpless, and then they begin to try to face the impact of the diagnosis.
The final stage of the grief cycle is acceptance. In reality, more than one parent said that they felt that “accepting fate” might be more accurate.
The findings of Luterman (2008) remind us that as practitioners in the hearing service industry, we cannot expect families of hearing-impaired children to end this grief cycle soon, and we must remember that practitioners cannot easily intervene.
The fitter may inadvertently emphasize some issues that are not the parents’ most concern, which may cause confusion or pressure for the parents.
For example, during the first hearing aid fitting, the fitter may say that you must ensure that your child wears the hearing aid every day, so that the TA will have the best conditions to accumulate language experience and develop language skills.
Perhaps we can consider using another angle to express it, which looks more like from the perspective of a parent. For example, the more your child wears a hearing aid, the more he can learn about your love and care for him from the sounds around him, and the more he can understand when you are teasing him and when you are listening carefully. The more TA can become part of the family.
Social competence
As children grow up, their social reach extends to peers.
Here, we have also observed the difficulties of hearing impaired children. Due to the slow development of communication skills, hearing impaired children have fewer opportunities to interact with their peers, so it is difficult to learn social rules related to communication.
This requires different roles in society to work together to remove obstacles to the growth of hearing-impaired children, including audiologists, speech therapists, special education teachers, parents, and so on.
Finally, after understanding in detail how deaf affects the growth of hearing-impaired children, we can more accurately provide hearing rehabilitation services for hearing-impaired children.