Another reply to Sanjay

[Guest guest]

Hi Sanjay, with AV there are two basic components. One is the actual therapy

time, about an hour per day. This is really easy to do while working, as long

as you have the time to go to the AV sessions which are usually during working

hours. The beauty of AV is that it is FUN! What it amounts to is spending a

total of an hour or so (can be chopped up into shorter sessions) every day

" playing " with your child. I've known parents who did this before work in the

morning or in the evening one parent would " play " while the other would cook and

clean up etc. This is the " quality " time.

The other component is the quantity time - making every part of every day a

language learning experience. I always called it " Pump in the language. "

According to Carol Flexer, 90% of what kids learn is via overhearing. And kids

with hearing loss and hearing aids can't overhear. So their language input is

diminished. So your job in AV is to try to make up for this 90% that they miss.

So it is extremely important that they be in an environment during the day where

they are able to hear - within earshot, and getting high quality lanugage input.

This isn't just true for AV, if your child were learning ASL or any other

language they would need to be immersed in that language for most of every day.

This is where you really have to make the hard decisions. Because you have a

window of only a few short years to make a huge difference in your child's life.

And the time you spend up front will pay dividends into the future! I'd suggest

you read Carol Flexer's book, Facilitating Hearing and Listening in Young

Children. She is an AV guru and you will gain an understanding of the issues

involved much better than I can explain.

Back to working, it really depends on your child care arrangements. If you

have a daycare center with 20 kids in a room with a hard surface floor, the

child with HA won't get much language exposure. If you have a home day care

with other children (3 or 4 not 15!) and lots of , it can be a great source of

language. If they spend hours with the TV or videos on, the child with HA

won't pick up much language. Turns out " canned " language is not the same as

lanugage attached to meaningful social interaction when it comes to kids

learning language. I decided to stay home when my third child was born, but

her hearing loss wasn't discovered until she was almost 4. So I stayed out

another few years until she was in real school. And we did kindergarten twice.

Every child is different, every family is different. So if one of you wants to

stay home, and you can manage for a few years financially, it could quite

possibly benefit your child. Let us know how it all works out. That's the

beauty of this list, no one tells you what you SHOULD do, but we all share

what has worked for us and hopefully you'll find what works for you and share it

with the next parents to come along. in GA