pulling HAs

[Guest guest]

I'd like to know if any other parents have had a similar experience. And

can you offer any insight or tell me what the eventual outcome was?...

My son is almost 20 months old. He has a severe/profound loss bilaterally

and has been wearing hearing aids since he was 3 months old. We've gone

through a couple phases of him pulling them out. We would never know the

exact reason why he would do this, but it eventually stopped. We are now in

the third phase of him pulling out the aids again. This is the longest it

has ever lasted. It's been about 2 1/2 months. He just started one day

pulling at them and for a few weeks I had to put them in 25 - 35 times a day.

It was so frustrating not knowing what the problem was, especially because

he had been so good with them before. I had to be on top of him all the

time. He would pull them out and then walk over to me and hand them to me.

He did not ever miss not having them in although he receives some benefit

from the aids. He has a great amount of receptive language.

Eventually he calmed down a bit and he was only pulling them out 2 - 3 times

a day. Now for the past 3 weeks the pulling is increasing again! 8- 10

times a day. There are certain times I can predict when he will do it now.

Whenever he is irritated or when I tell him " no " or if I have to take him

away from something, he immediately goes for the ears and throws his aids on

the floor. He also does it in the car. And he will often try to pull them

out during diaper changes because he hates having to lie down for a diaper

change. I have to wrestle with him on every diaper change - he won't stay

still and he screams and whines. Sometimes he'll just pull them out for no

apparent reason. When I try to put them back in now, he puts up a big fight.

It used to be that he would stand in his crib patiently and let me put the

aids in when he woke up. Now he sees them coming and runs to the other

corner of the crib, covers his ears, or collapses on the mattress making it

very difficult. I don't know what's going on. There are times when he

leaves them in for hours and seems to be content. He responds to everything

I say. When he has them out he's very happy. Doesn't seem to miss a thing.

Occasionally he will tap on his ears when they're out as if he notices

something missing, but if I show him the aids he has no interest in putting

them back in. The longer this goes on the more tired I get of battling the

issue.

He is having CI surgery next week and I worry he will continue this behavior

with the implant. This will be very discouraging. Any thoughts? At this

point, I'm not really looking for any remedies because I think I've tried

everything. I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel or some stories

of similar experiences and any ideas of why their child was doing it and how

long did it go on? Almost 3 months just seems crazy to me.

Kearns

's mom, 20 months, severe/profound