New therapy makes message clear

HEARING impaired therapy is changing because children are now being diagnosed soon after birth.

The newborn hearing tests introduced last year have resulted in parents seeking help for their babies at two-weeks-old, instead of two or three-years-old.

Visiting American specialists Jim and Lea Watson are helping to train more therapists at the Cora Barclay Centre, Gilberton, in an early intervention program known as auditory-verbal therapy.

The therapy aims to teach children to use the hearing they have and to speak, rather than use sign language.

Mr Watson is a great-great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, whose mother and wife were deaf, and who advocated assimilating the deaf into the hearing community.

"What we're doing is reconnecting with the dream parents to communicate with their children in the spoken language," he said.

Mr Watson said some parents tended to interact less with their hearing-impaired babies because of the lack of feedback they received from them.

The program taught the parents how to interact with their babies, to introduce them to sounds and to maximise the use of their residual hearing.

Mrs Watson said the introduction of the newborn screening test had resulted in children having more years of therapy and being more advanced when it was time to start kindergarten.

"When they're first told, most of the parents go through the stages of grief as if their baby died," she said. "We help them build back that dream they had and we've seen so much success." Six-month-old Macy Lane, of Williamstown, was diagnosed with profound hearing loss at two-weeks.

Her parents, Lauren and Rick, were shocked by the news. "I was devastated but now I know it's not the end of the world," Mrs Lane said. "It's not going to hold her back."

The family has been learning auditory-verbal therapy since Macy was just a few weeks old.

Mr Lane said Macy was demonstrating to them that she could hear with her hearing aids.

Between one and two babies in every 1000 will be diagnosed with hearing loss.