Treatment
Hearing aids and cochlear implants might make it possible for the child to hear sounds of their hearing range; still, they will not restore normal hearing. Cochlear implants are capable of stimulating the auditory nerve directly to restore some hearing, but the sound quality will never be that of a normal hearing ear, suggesting that deafness cannot be fully overcome by medical devices. Some say that the benefits and safety of cochlear implants continues to grow, especially when children with implants receive a lot of oral educational support. It is a goal for some audiologists to test and fit a deaf child with a cochlear implant by six months of age, so that they don't get behind in learning language. In fact, there are expectations that if children get fit for implants early enough, they can acquire verbal language skills to the same level as their peers with normal hearing.
Read more about this topic: Prelingual Deafness
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, “Go to sleep by yourselves.” And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child’s duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)