Fitting Children with Hearing Aids

Hearing aids provide the children suitable amplification and develop optimal communication skills and due to this children need to wear hearing aids. In the procedure of fitting a hearing aid the first step is that to get a good behavioral audiogram. Audiogram helps the child to detect the sound easily. Audiogram also determines the child’s threshold. You should need to know the child's hearing threshold very deeply because without a hearing aid it is very difficult to decide that children threshold should be with a hearing aid. The variation is how much gain is needed at that frequency. Hearing aids are selected and attuned to supply the child with the true amount of gain for each frequency tested. It is very important to have an unaided audiogram and then rebuild the testing with the hearing aid. This procedure will allow you to measure the definite gain which is the child receiving.

If your child is the position of repeating words then it is best time to do word discrimination testing.  The word discrimination testing is done with and without any form of hearing aid. If your child during the testing of word discrimination repeats a list of words then the percentage of words which your child repeat properly is known as word discrimination score. If the word discrimination score of your child does not appreciably improve then the hearing aid is not a good fit for your child. Although, some children are very young for the purpose of word discrimination testing so that’s why aided and unaided behavioral audiograms are very necessary in hearing aid fitting for children.

Behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aids are very durable and quiet hearing aid devices and due to this BTE hearing aids are normally recommended for children. BTE hearing aids easily fit at the back of the child's ear and then BTE hearing aids connected to the ear by an ear mold. Hearing aids devices which is very practical for children known as BTE hearing aids because BTE hearing aids are less dependent on the size of the child's inner ear. Many parents like to purchase BTE hearing aids for their children because they know that they can easily monitor and control behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aids.

In fact BTE hearing aids are comparatively small but the look of BTE hearing aids is large as compared to a young child's head. Some times a child's ear not in the condition to hold the BTE hearing aids against their head because child’s ear is large enough. Actually the adjustments to the tone hook or ear mold generally help to clasp the hearing aid in specific place more firmly. A piece of tubing which is known as Huggy is also used for added hold while fitting of BTE hearing aids. The tube which is called Huggy connects to the hearing aid and helps to hold BTE hearing aids against the child's head.

The process of hearing testing is very important process for those children who fitted with hearing aids. The motive of hearing testing is to see that hearing aid is a good fit for the child or not.