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Detecting Deafness

© Julie Moore

Detecting deafness at an early age in children is challenging. Before an infant is four or five months old, there are few clues, since your little one is still only just beginning to experience the world through looking and listening, touching, tasting and smelling. To add to this, babies with hearing difficulties, just as babies with normal hearing, make the cooing noises that parents usually interpret as first language attempts, even though these early noises are not a response to an initial external sound. In the deaf child or child with less than perfect hearing, cooing noises can be misleading.

About the middle of the first year, a baby with normal hearing will usually begin to progress from cooing noises to noises with more varied consonant and vowel sounds, such as "da-da-da" and "ba-ba-ba," which sound more like "baby talk" or babbling. Now is when children with and without hearing impairment begin to sound different from one another, but the difference may still be difficult to hear, especially is this is the first baby in your life, or you have little or no previous experience with babies from which to draw upon. In this case, a child health professional is capable of detecting hearing impairment.

There are clues you can look for earlier than those at the babbling stage, however. Ask yourself if your child startles when someone makes a sudden noise or whether your little one has begun to seek out the source of sounds and people talking. Does his head turn to follow your voice or even the noises from a television, a car, the washing machine, or a door opening? If you have any doubts about his hearing ability, set up some opportunities for hearing. Talk to her at close range when her head is turned in the opposite direction, for example, and see if she turns towards you, or put a CD in the stereo to see if she will respond.

Ultimately, since language development is so intrinsically tied to proper listening, it is crucial that even the slightest doubts about your child's hearing be promptly discussed with your family physician. If you have a baby who is relatively quiet but has no other external signs of hearing impairment, there is most likely no need for worry. Infant quietness may also be related to:

- postnatal health problems - premature births - being a twin - inherited quietness or late-language acquisition on either side of the family