Children with partial or mild hearing loss can encounter challenges in everyday environments that go unnoticed due to their diagnosis, parents say. <\/p>\n
Arlo, eight, from Cottingham, has unilateral hearing loss, or single-sided deafness, which wasn’t picked up by healthcare professionals until she was two.<\/p>\n
She uses a hearing aid, but busier environments such as a classroom can make it difficult to concentrate, or pinpoint individual speakers, according to her mum Ali.<\/p>\n
“It can definitely take it out of her after a school day,” the 38-year-old explains.<\/p>\n
“She says: ‘my ears are aching now, I’m very tired’.<\/p>\n
“People can wrongly assume if you’re not fully or profoundly deaf, then everything’s okay and you can just carry on your day as normal.”<\/p>\n
Arlo is one of more than 53,000 deaf children and young people in the UK, according to the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS). <\/p>\n
48% are reported to have mild or unilateral hearing loss.<\/p>\n
Despite this, the charity says there are still “gaps in understanding” around the impact this type of hearing loss can have on children, following a recent survey.<\/p>\n
Just 36% of respondents agreed that mild or single-sided deafness can have a great impact on a child’s daily life, with one in five believing it to have little or no impact.<\/p>\n
If an environment is too loud, such as a music concert, Arlo can end up turning off her hearing aid entirely, which can make it difficult to communicate.<\/p>\n
“If people do talk and it’s noisy, they cover their mouth,” Ali says.<\/p>\n
“She doesn’t necessarily lip read, but she’ll watch what they’re saying.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Children with partial or mild hearing loss can encounter challenges in everyday environments that go unnoticed due to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-806582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}