Setting expectations
It is very important to understand what hearing aids can and cannot do. Hearing aids can compensate for the hearing loss across the frequency range. They do this by making softer sounds louder, medium sounds comfortable, and by making sure that the louder sounds are not too loud. Hearing aids cannot make the hearing normal. They can only make the sounds loud enough to be useful to the brain.
Helping improve speech
In the days and months ahead, your family will make decisions about how to help your child express his/her needs and interact with the world. It will be important to learn about a variety of ways to communicate with your baby. Early intervention providersor speech and language therapists can help you in this process. They can help you learn how to teach communication skills to your child in a way that works best for your family.
Encourage your child
Very young infants spend a lot of time asleep and they will not be wearing their hearing instruments during these periods. However, as your baby grows, so does the amount of awake time where the use of hearing instruments is crucial. The initial natural reaction is quite understandably one of surprise, accompanied by a desire to remove them but as long as the hearing aids are set up appropriately with the right amount of volume and loudness then a majority of babies do not want to remove their hearing aid.
Getting used to hearing aids
Every day brings a new constellation of different sounds and voices to your baby. In the home environment, the hearing instruments will enable your baby to hear all that is going on in this relatively quiet environment. When you are spending time with your baby in these circumstances, it is important to reduce distracting background noise as much as possible, for example by switching off the TV and radio and staying close to your baby when you are talking.