Coping with Childhood Hearing Loss: 14-Month Hearing and Speech Milestones

When my little Kendall was born, we were told that she has mild to moderate hearing loss.  It took hours and hours of testing with multiple audiologists to figure this out, but it didn’t come as a complete shock.  My husband has similar hearing loss, his cousin has dramatic hearing loss and her son also has hearing loss in both ears.

The local County of Education quickly stepped in to offer their services: speech, sign language, special education – all in our own home at no cost.  Apparently if your child is born with hearing loss, these are services that are offered free of charge no matter your income.  While I was very grateful for the services, I disagreed with much of it.  By the second or third in-home session, I became very irritated with the fact that they were telling me that my child would need special education and that she would quickly fall behind with her speech and development.  Her hearing loss is very mild and we were shown a “banana chart” of the sounds she would struggle with.  In a nutshell, we were told by our audiologist that she would just miss little subtleties in speech but overall she would be just fine.  Especially since we bought her

Kendall is a very nurturing child and loves to carry her stuffed animals around like babies.  She’ll hold them and say “ahhh, my baby” and gives them kisses and hugs.  So, we use her stuffed animals to teach her animal sounds, animal names and colors.  Four of her favorite stuffed animals are from

We also really love wooden toys, puzzles and musical toys.  Check out some of our other articles below:

Coping with childhood hearing loss is different for every family.  We will most likely have struggles along the way but are fully ready and capable of working through them.