By John Muturi

We called him Gitaigua, literally translated, ‘one who doesn’t hear’. We made fun of him in school. It was our pastime in our primary school to haul the most obscene words right in his face while smiling with him.

John had a hearing problem and instead of sympathising we put him down. Hearing difficulties impaired John’s ability to interact with us, and pushed him to isolation.

But how were we to know that John never got feedback from his own speech because he could not hear the sounds he made? There is a clear explanation to this — a deaf baby starts to make sounds at about the same age as a hearing child, but the lack of feedback means he has less encouragement to practice and extend them.

Since babbling and listening to sounds provide the foundation for later speech development, a child who misses these early experiences will find learning to speak harder than a child with normal hearing.

A hearing-impaired child may be slower to speak, may not use his first words until long after the age he or she is expected to, and may be slower to understand the meaning of words. I wish someone explained this to us at the time and we would have spared the boy a lot of trauma.

Unfortunately, many children and adults with a hearing loss go through such experiences every day.

It does not matter whether they have mild hearing loss where a child can’t hear a whisper; moderate loss when he can’t hear a normal voice three feet away from him; severe loss when he can’t hear a human voice at all or profound hearing loss when he does not react to any sound whatsoever, they go through specific problems in life.

Whether total or partial, hearing loss is the most common cause underlying a child’s failure to develop normal speech. A hearing-impaired child may be slower to speak, and slower to understand the meaning of words. Approximately one in every 10 children has a mild hearing loss and approximately one in 1,000 has a severe hearing loss or total deafness.

Hearing loss does not necessarily run in families; in deed, nearly 90 per cent of deaf children have parents with normal hearing.

With normal hearing, sound is picked up by the outer ear, then passes to the eardrum through the ear canal. This activates the small bones in the middle ear, passing the sound on to the cochlea, where it changes into electrical impulses.

These electrical impulses are like messages, which pass along the nerve of hearing to the brain. Problems can arise in any part of this chain, and the sad thing is that in majority of instances, the cause of hearing defects cannot be traced.

There are two types of hearing loss:

1: Conducive, in which case sound is prevented from reaching the inner ear from the outer and middle ear, mostly due to a blockage of wax. ‘Swimmer’s ear’- resulting from bacteria and water trapped by earwax, also causes conductive hearing loss, as is middle-ear infection, which is often caused by the common cold. The good news is that medical treatment by an ear specialist will reverse the impediment.

2: Perceptive is more severe since it is often incurable. It is caused by damage to the inner ear, the hearing nerve, or that part of the brain responsible for hearing. Perceptive hearing loss is often present at birth. Majority of children with this condition have some residual hearing and therefore benefit from using a hearing aid.

It is, however, difficult for parents to detect hearing loss in a baby but some of the signs to look out for include:

• Child is unresponsive to your voice. Your baby should show an almost immediate reaction when you speak to him or her, either by turning his or her head towards you or else by showing some change in his or her behaviour. Failure or slowness to react could herald a hearing loss.

• Not being soothed by your voice, unless you are in her line of vision. While unhappy babies will easily be soothed by a familiar voice, a baby with impaired hearing may be soothed only when she can actually see his or her parent.

• Being startled when someone comes into her line of vision. It is easy for babies with normal hearing to learn to expect the arrival of another person by the sound they make, for instance, approaching footsteps. Not so for a baby with hearing impairment because they do not have this early-warning system, and therefore may be alarmed when he or she suddenly sees you.

reading the signs

• Restricted sounds after the age of six months. Beyond this age, a deaf baby’s speech fails to develop, whereas a hearing baby’s sounds continue to increase.

• Inability to locate a sound source. By the age of two months, a baby with normal hearing will respond to a sound by turning his eyes or head towards it. A baby with a hearing loss, however, may seem confused because he cannot tell where the sound is coming from.

• Always turning the same ear towards a sound source, irrespective of the direction of the noise. A baby with normal hearing will turn the left or right side of her head towards a sound, depending on the sound’s direction.

It is easier for parents to detect a hearing loss in an older child. The signs that your child has a hearing problem include:

* Failure to respond to a simple request. Often your child will pretend not to hear you but if that happens consistently it is possible he or she has a hearing problem.

* Failure to stop an activity when she is told to. If this happens repeatedly, it may be a signs of hearing loss. Also you might notice that he or she needs to have questions repeated before they can respond. A child with partial hearing often becomes confused when asked a question, because she can’t hear it properly.