Krysty

Becoming Stuck in Your Childs’s Hearing Loss

05/28/2013

349468_struggle Over the years I have spoken with numerous parents, from a personal as well as a professional perspective and while every family responds differently to a hearing loss diagnosis, there are also some characteristics that more successful families share.

Adjust Your Attitude

I have written about this before, but your attitude and acceptance of your child’s hearing loss goes a long way to creating a more peaceful climate for everyone. Children are really good at sensing the moods of others. If you are stressed and tense all the time about your child’s diagnosis, your child will begin to feel that there is something not good about their hearing loss.

Yoshinaga-Itano and Abdala de Uzcategui, (2001) have shown that parents of children with mild to moderate hearing loss are often more stressed than parents of children with more profound losses. Reasons can be they face more educational and therapeutic choices; also there is the potential that their child will have further hearing loss which can be stressful.

While I understand these stresses, having been through them, I also know the power of practicing a positive attitude.

Talk About It

Get real comfortable talking about your child’s hearing loss. When your child sees how easily you talk about hearing loss they will feel more comfortable about themselves.

If you don’t talk about and discuss hearing loss with your child then they will be uncomfortable discussing it with other people. They won’t know how to answer questions, or how to speak up when their needs aren’t being met.

Keep Things in Perspective

Yes, your child has hearing loss and no; it is not the end of the world. Yes, your child will need assistance with communication either through a device (such as hearing aids or cochlear implants), or through the learning of ASL or lip-reading. But the opportunities today are limitless.

Move Beyond “Why Me?”

If you are okay with your child’s hearing loss, they will be okay. There will be some changes that will need to be made with regard to education and communication needs, but what won’t change is the need your child has for love and support. Find the joy in your child’s voice, or the thrill of having them sign their first full thought. It’s about adapting and coming to terms with the child you have, rather than the child you don’t have.

Filed Under: Parenting Leave a Comment

Summer Camp for Children with Hearing Loss: An Interview with the Founders of Camped Up

05/08/2013

Finding a summer camp for your child with hearing loss can be a tricky endeavor. While summer programs can be a time when your child expands their horizons in a new environment, it can also be tricky when you have to teach counselors about communication needs, and equipment troubleshooting.

Enter Dana Selznick. I recently had the opportunity to connect with this Hearing Education Service (HES) provider, who works on the Upper West Side in New York City. Dana, along with her two partners Arielle Ditkowich and Brittany Prell (fellow HES providers) is opening a summer program designed specifically for Hearing Aid and Cochlear Implant users.

I caught up with the three co-founders of Camped Up and we had the chance to discuss how they met, goals of the program, and summer camp memories!

It sounds like you three have a bunch great energy going on between you. How did you meet?

Dana and Arielle became instant friends during orientation on the first day of grad school. The next year Brittany started the same program and all the professors kept telling each of us how similar we were to each other. When the three of us finally met it was clear our professors knew us well, we have been friends ever since. After graduation we all started careers as New York City HES providers and have succeeded with each others help and guidance.

Why a summer camp? Where did idea for Camped Up come from?

Arielle is very active in summer camps and was thinking about a way to bring her love of camp to students in the New York area. She approached Dana and Brittany with the idea of starting a camp in NYC for Hearing Aid and Cochlear Implant users and they jumped on the idea! She also thought of Neil, a good friend and former camp director at her lifelong sleepaway camp who now runs multiple camps throughout the US. Upon calling him for advice, he loved the idea so much he immediately said he wanted to be a part of it and offered years of camp and administrative expertise.

One dinner later, Camped Up was formed. We ran the idea by a few parents and they loved it.

What can you tell me about Camped Up? What will it offer for children with hearing loss that other camps don’t?

We have created a camp that every child in New York would fall in love with. The reason that it is a specialized camp for hearing loss and spoken language is because we make the environment conducive for listening.

Our camp avoids any acoustic challenges by providing appropriate modifications to the environment. We have the tools, technology and training necessary to provide the best possible experience for all of our campers. This camp has something for everybody.

Whether you are into sports, arts and crafts or science, Camped Up is an all around fun day camp!

What do you hope Camped Up will accomplish? What experiences do you want children to have?

We thought that it would be a great idea to provide children with a summer camp experience in which they could come together and play with other Hearing Aid and Cochlear Implant users. We hope that our campers will gain a sense of pride and comfort with their hearing loss, and make new friendships within this community.

We want our campers to have an all around amazing summer camp experience. We want them excited to come to camp in the morning and not wanting to leave at the end of the day. At the end of camp we hope they will go home with new friends, the same love for camp that we had as campers, and memories from the exciting activities that they will be talking about for months to come.

Can you tell me a bit about the experiences you all bring to the camp?

All three of us have a dual masters degree from Columbia University- Teachers College in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Education. There we learned how to use all forms of assistive technology, and have been implementing these skills throughout our careers as New York City HES providers. Together we have years of camp experience and involvement in a wide variety of programs geared towards children. And most importantly we all share a love of children.

Did any of you go to camp as a child? What memories do you have?

You could say that, collectively we have over 45 years of camp experience! All of us have attended day camps, sleep away camps and have gone from counselors, to group leaders throughout the years.

Dana’s favorite memories from camp are the camp songs and cheers she learned and sang throughout the summers.

Brittany loved the circle games and team building activities she played with her camp friends.

Arielle’s favorite memory was making a picture frame in Arts and Crafts that still sits on her desk with pictures from camp.

Is there anything else you want to share about Camped Up?

We just want everyone to know that CampedUp’s main goal is to provide an awesome summer for your child!

Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, and I wish you all a great summer of creating camp memories for a new generation of children. For more information about Camped Up, please visit their website at www.campedup.com

Filed Under: Special Needs, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Being – ish…

04/12/2013

My son’s school has a book of the month. Each month several copies of the same book are passed from family to family, and the entire community spends some time reading the same book. The books are always picture books, meant to be read in one sitting. It’s an interesting program and one that always brings home a book, and an author, that we are not familiar with.

The books are generally tied in to the theme of the month – which is often reduced to a word or a phrase that the students and teachers spend time talking about and doing activities around.

This month the book is called Ish, by Peter H. Reynolds and the word is PRAISE.

Ish is about a boy, Ramon, who loves to draw. He draws everything and he draws everywhere he goes. One day he is drawing some flowers and his older brother laughs at him. Ramon becomes upset and stops drawing. He becomes upset because his drawings aren’t perfect. He is rescued by his younger sister, Marisol, who has collected an entire gallery of Ramon’s cast-off drawings. As she walks Ramon through the gallery she describes a picture of a vase as “vase-ish” and this one word unlocks Ramon’s mind and he starts drawing again with a passion. Drawing trees that look “tree-ish” and houses that look “house-ish” and suns that look “sun-ish.” His mind is freed because he is no longer trying to define his drawings before he has even started.

This lead me to begin thinking of my son and where he fits in the world. He could be “hearing-ish” or he could be “deaf-ish” – it’s really a matter of how you look at it. And maybe if we weren’t so busy defining everything as parents, and educators – then we could simply allow our children to define themselves as they wish.

And really that would be okay because we are all sort of “ish” in our respective ways.

Filed Under: Hearing Loss Leave a Comment

One Family’s Hearing Loss Story

03/25/2013

son It has been almost four years since my son was diagnosed with late onset hearing loss. I try to recall what our life was like prior to his diagnosis, but that seems like another lifetime, another family. I mention this because an essay I wrote about our world prior to his diagnosis is published this week on Brain, Child magazine’s website. (You can read the essay here.)

I can’t even begin to describe all the changes that have occurred in those four years. Hearing loss has become a part of our life, but not in the way that I imagined.

When my son was first diagnosed I saw the hearing loss and hearing aids as being front and center in our lives. I thought that is all that people would focus on, all that we would be focused on. But, instead, the hearing aids have slipped slowly into the background, they have become secondary.

My son turns seven in a few short weeks. He loves Ninjago, playing the piano, riding his bike, and playing basketball with his friends at recess. He paints, plays ice hockey, skis, and swims. He loves to tell jokes, read books, and write stories – and oh yeah – he wears bilateral hearing aids. No big deal.