Growing Up with Hearing Loss

Growing Up with Hearing Loss is an interactive platform to help children and young adults with hearing loss and their families successfully manage key transitions and use them as opportunities to learn, grow, and discover new things about themselves and the world.

What are the benefits?

Enables children and young adults with hearing loss and their families to:
  • Learn about their new environment and plan a successful transition
  • Identify and articulate their needs for professional support
  • Openly discuss the child or young adult's hearing loss in the family
Provides hearing care professionals with:
  • An effective go-to suite of online resources for children, young adults, and their families to help them manage transitions
  • Key insights into the needs of children and their families to provide appropriate and timely support
  • A clinical framework based on the principles of self-determination

Growing Up with Hearing Loss contents

Why this tool?

For children and young adults with hearing loss, transitions present additional opportunities and challenges. By reflecting on where they are now and where they are going next, they can begin to think about their short and long-term goals and learn to plan the steps they will take to get there.

For hearing care professionals, Growing Up with Hearing Loss offers an effective way to help children and young adults reflect on how they are doing and where they are headed. You can use this information to structure conversations in the appointment and explore effective next steps and strategies with them.

Activities up to age 9 are written for parents to complete with their children. Activities for ages 9 and up are intended for young adults to complete on their own.

How to use Growing Up with Hearing Loss

  • Send a link to the child's parents or school-based hearing care professional. If you are working with a teenager or young adult, send the link directly to them.
     
  • Ask them to explore with their parents or school professional what they need for their next transition.
     
  • Ask them to print out their responses to the exercises in the tool and bring them to the appointment or their next educational program planning session.
     
  • Use their notes as a conversation starting point on how they are feeling about the transition and what steps are needed to create and implement a plan to reach these goals.