Hearing Families

Often parents will approach a mental health professional when there is a specific problem that is troubling their child. Their toddler wakes up at night, is biting at daycare, or crying too frequently. Their school-aged child is having discipline problems at school, fighting with siblings or refusing to do homework. But sometimes parents of a child with hearing loss senses that their child is just not doing what the other kids her age are doing. They may perceive a problem in their child’s behavior but can’t quite put their finger on what the problem is.

There is a body of research on immaturity in children with hearing loss but in general, it is not instructive to modern parents of children who use assistive technology. Why? The information on immaturity comes from old research – written 30 or 40 years ago. Those kids, without the benefit of modern hearing aids and cochlear implants were often significantly delayed in their communication and language development. It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect a 6 year old child to behave like a 6 year old should when her ability to communicate is at a 3 year old level. This literature makes me appreciate the technology that we have today but doesn’t give me a lot of guidance about the issue of immaturity in kids with modern assistive technology and oral communication.

While there definitely is a range, our kids today often have good speech and language skills, close to age level, if not at age level. The issue then is a concern about immaturity in kids whose language skills are roughly age-appropriate.

I always remind parents that you can’t make specific changes or encourage specific behaviors until you identify them – the first step in addressing immaturity is to define “immaturity.” When parents sense that something is not right, I always trust their intuitions. But in order to address the concerns, we need to work to clarify exactly how these concerns manifest themselves in the child. Here is an example:

Annie was 11 years old and was doing well in her 6^th grade class. Her teacher was pleased with her work in school and said that she was doing well. However, the teacher noticed that in comparison to the rest of the class, Annie’s behavior seemed a little immature and sometimes inappropriate. Annie’s parents had gotten the same feeling at home but neither the teacher nor Annie’s parents knew what to do about it.

For a week they observed Annie’s behavior at school and at home and paid careful attention to her interactions with classmates and her sisters at home (ages 8 and 14).

They kept a log of what they saw with as much detail as they could. At the end of week, they sat down together to share their observations and to try to find a strategy to help Annie.

They realized that there were three major ways that Annie’s behavior seemed out-of-synch with her peers and disruptive at home:

1. When approaching classmates or siblings, Annie seemed to do all the talking. She didn’t find out what was going on before she arrived and therefore was viewed as disrupting when she tried to join the group who were already playing or talking.
2. When Annie didn’t get her way in games with other children, she would start crying and the other children would become flustered (since she was too old to be crying about stuff like this) and let her just have what she wanted. But they didn’t want to play with her much anymore.
3. When her parents or teacher asked her to do something, especially moving on to the next activity, Annie usually argued for more time to finish what she was doing or to be let off the hook completely for the next requirement.

Once they were able to “put their finger” on the problems, they could then set out to try to work on ways to encourage Annie to stop behaving in ways that were viewed as immature as compared to her peers.

How would you address these concerns? Have you dealt with issues like these with your child? Please let us know what you think!

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Tags: cooperation between parents and teachers, deaf, hearing loss, immaturity, no specific problem, parents