EI: Guiding Parents Toward Full-Time Device Use

Audience: Early intervention providers, parent counselors, speech therapists

If you’re an early interventionist, parent counselor or speech therapist serving families of infants and young children with hearing loss, you know the value of keeping hearing devices working properly for these children at all times. You also know this effort can be challenging, even for the most attentive families. Parents and caregivers get busy, distracted, and may even be in a state of fear or denial.

Patience and focus are keys to a provider’s success in fostering progress for children during their early language learning years. This half-hour course offers real-world advice for steadily guiding parents and caregivers to help their infants and young children learn to use their devices to listen during all waking hours. It focuses on device retention, increasing wear time, and how to check and troubleshoot hearing aids, bone conduction hearing devices and cochlear implants. Knowledge, understanding and focused cooperation will lead to better intervention outcomes during this crucial time in a child’s life.

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

• Explain to parents when a child should wear hearing aids, bone conduction hearing devices and cochlear implants
• Give examples of approaches for device retention
• Provide parents with strategies for increasing wear time with hearing aids, bone conduction hearing devices and cochlear implants
• Demonstrate to parents how to check and troubleshoot hearing aids, bone conduction hearing devices and cochlear implants
• Teach parents to utilize the Ling sound check to test hearing aids, bone conduction hearing devices and cochlear implants

Length:  38 minutes

Continuing Education Credits

.5 LSLS CEUs, AG Bell Academy

This course has been approved for Illinois Early Intervention Credit Hours (0.5 Intervention)

Disclosure Statements

Ellie White, MS, MAEd, CED
Financial: The presenter, Ms. White, is the former curriculum director at CID – Central Institute for the Deaf.
Non-financial: No relevant non-financial relationship exists.