How Are Children Tested for Hearing Loss

Hearing loss is detrimental for all age groups, but it has the most lasting effect on the growth and development of children. Having untreated hearing loss in newborn babies and young children can interfere with their ability to learn, speak and understand language. This makes it essential to diagnose children with hearing loss and treat it as early in their life as possible.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends that all newborns be screened for hearing loss before being discharged from the hospital and all 50 states in the U.S. require newborn hearing tests. However, despite there being no signs of hearing loss at birth, your child may still develop the condition in later years due to reasons such as a middle ear infection, the use of certain antibiotics, injury or noise exposure. You must get your child’s hearing tested if you feel he shows symptoms of hearing loss.

Hearing tests for children

There may be many warning signs triggering the belief that your child may not be hearing normally. He may seem distracted or ignore you when you call him. Or, he may have trouble keeping up with multiple instructions. Sometimes a child with hearing loss will do badly at school because he can’t hear his teacher properly. If you noticed any such signs, you must take your child to a hearing healthcare professional and talk to him about your concerns.

The first step in getting your child’s hearing tested is going for a hearing screening. This is a cheap (sometimes free), quick and non-intrusive test to see whether your child has normal hearing or not. If the screening determines that your child does indeed have hearing loss, you will then need to go to a hearing healthcare professional who will dive deeper and run some hearing tests.

What happens during a hearing test?

A pediatric audiologist who specializes in evaluating and assisting kids with hearing loss and works closely with doctors, educators, and speech or language pathologists typically conducts hearing tests. With ample specialized training, masters or doctorate degrees in audiology, and certifications by renowned institutions like the American Speech Language Hearing Association or the American Academy of Audiology, audiologists are well equipped to test, diagnose and help treat hearing loss in your child.

Several methods of testing can be used for children depending on the child’s age, development and health status. One kind of testing is behavioral in which a child’s behavioral response to sounds like calibrated speech and pure tones is carefully observed. The observations could be an infant’s eye movement, a toddler’s head turn, a preschooler’s game piece placement and so on.

If a child cannot be tested behaviorally, physiologic tests may be conducted. The Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) test, for example, involves the placement of tiny earphones in the child’s ear canal and small electrodes behind the ear and on the forehead. In this way, the auditory nerve can be used to study the functionality of the child’s inner ear and brainstem.