Family Quality Life Following Early Identification of Deafness - Assignment Example

FUNDAMENTALS OF AUDITORY- VERBAL PRACTICE Customer Inserts His/her Name Customer Inserts Grade Course Customer Inserts Tutor’s Name 25/02/ 2011 Family quality life following early identification of deafness The family setting is essential in the bringing up and care of children. This can be enhanced by specialists to make the family setting much stronger in this aspect. However many families may see this as a waste of time and financial resources, but this is not so. But this can be advocated through community based initiatives that involve the family that family set ups can take advantage of to increase the quality of life in the family. This family setting needs to have the ability to cope with stressful situations and such actions will be for the growth of the family. The family will hence have the ability to resist stress and such situations having a positive impact on the strength and bond of the family. Hence the discovery of deafness in a young child in the family will be easily dealt with, with a strong family setting. The family will be able to integrate and make wise use of their social and economic resources. A healthy family set up leads to increased quality of life in the family as each person’s potential is examined. This is more so relevance in the adaptation and acceptance of a young family member’s deafness (Rhoades, 200). The family’s quality of life is displayed when individuals in the family are glad to spend time with each other and integrate their activities when situations deem it necessary so that the family set up can be enhanced. However this is a very complex process which always needs the patience and dedication of the family members with the reality that individuals cannot possess the same characters or level of perseverance when the family is in a crisis. There is need for the family to be satisfied with situations it faces and spend time in situations outside the family environs. This brings to light the effect of deafness in some areas of the family’s quality of life as well as how emotions will run in the family, interaction of family members, parenting and overall emotional and physical support for the concerned young child and the rest of the family. Discovered deafness in a family will definately results in stress to the parents who may lack experience and skill in how to cope with the situation. Moreover, this is hardly a planned situation and is far from the mind of the parents, guardians or relevant parties. Researchers have speculated that early identification and intervention of deafness will result in better bonding and family adaptation. This will aid the family to sort out proper emotional support and will be used to this situation at an early time. However some may differ with this since they perceive that there will be negative attitude from the time a child is born. Critically arguing this out, early detection is much better since the family will learn to live with this situation as the family member grows up. Moreover proper measures will be taken into account to aid the family member interact with the society after seeing that his family has accepted him as he is and have equipped him with proper skills to cope with life even without assistance of parents or other family members. This will also lead to no cases of self pity by the concerned individual since through enough support groups the family will realize that deafness does not render an individual redundant or useless in the society at large (Rhoades, 200). It is noted that parents experience a sense of shock and grief after they discover that their child is deaf or will be deaf later in his life after an early detection. This is quite normal but should pass with time since reality must kick in and the affected child made to feel that it is not the end of life as he grows up. This will help that child to see a pathway to great things in life (Rhoades, 200). Diminished quality of life a family set up results immediately after detection due to the negative attitude. Many parents do not know how to handle this situation and efar not handling this situation when it comes up. This will also lead to a family withdrawing from social interactions, which is crucial in increasing quality of life of a family. Hence the need for social support grpus in centres that are involved in detection of hearing or deafness. There would be need for parents to help all the children in the family interact well for the proper upbringing of all parties concerned. The need to reinforce the quality of life in a family that is newly faced with deafness will go smoothly with increased information, improved education on how to handle such situations and strongly formed and adopted parent support groups. Access to information will delude the negative attitude most individuals have to being deaf and being exposed to other people who have had positive experience after early detection helps a lot. Financial support goes along way too to alleviate and reduce stress levels within a family in terms of insurance and listening devices such as hearing aids. Moreover, classes to the affected party in terms of lip reading and sign language will aid enormously in order to gain communication skills. Financial support will be derived form family gaining information on donors and other money pooling ventures such as extra working hours and planned contributions. However these means to collect financial resources should be made moderately to avoid neglect of the family as time would just be involved in looking for financial resources. In order to increase the overall quality of life for the family there will also be the need for marriage and family counseling to make all parties let go of feelings of guilt and regret with a young child who is deaf. This also aids to avoid the blaming game between partners in a marriage and if that does happen, the marriage counseling will help theses parties repair their relationship and avoid this spilling over to the rest of the family. speech production accuracy and variability in young cochlear implant recipients; comparisons with typically developing age peers Cochlear implants (CIs) have been made available to aid in hearing sensitivity and improved speech for deaf children. The benefit of implants of these devices in early school years or alternatively later in life is under debate. However critically arguing this out is that the implantation of these devices at an early age aids deaf children to develop speaking ability or some level of hearing. Researches by Connor, Hieber and Zwolen (2000) have substantiated this through a study by use of 147 children who were implanted between ages 1 and 10. This study revealed that children implanted at younger ages made greater progress in consonant accuracy than those implanted at older ages. These authors aided in further research in 2006 with 100 children to define the effects of age at implantation on consonant accuracy. The authors noted that those who received cochlear implants before 30 months exhibited fundamental growth patterns in consonant pronunciation and accuracy that was not found in older recipients. This showed that early implantation was of more value to the recipient while still very young to aid in speech and listening capacity (Rhoades, 200). Further input was put by Ertmer and Inniger (2009) and Nikolopoulos, Archbold and O’Donoghue (1999) who made their contribution in terms of children with CIs having more awareness of the acoustic features of consonants, vowels and words at roughly the same time as they begin to say words (Rhoades, 200). Language outcomes for children of low-income families enrolled in auditory verbal therapy Principles of Auditory –Verbal Therapy 1. Promote early diagnosis of hearing loss in newborns, infants, toddlers and young children, followed by immediate management and Auditory Verbal therapy. 2. Recommend immediate assessment and use of appropriate, state of the art hearing technology to obtain maximum benefits of auditory stimulation. 3. Guide and coach parents to help their child use hearing as the primary sensory modality in developing listening and spoken language. 4. Guide and coach parents to become the primary facilitation of their child’s listening and spoken language development through active consistent participation in individualized auditory verbal therapy. 5. Guide and coach parents to create environs that support listening for the acquisition of of spoken language throughout the child’s daily activities. 6. Guide and coach parents to help their child integrate listening and spoken language into all aspects of the child’s life. 7. Guide and coach parents to use natural developmental patterns of audition, speech, cognition and communication. 8. Guide and coach parents to help their child self-monitor spoken language through listening. 9. Administer ongoing formal and informal diagnostic assessments to develop individualized Auditory Verbal treatment plans, to monitor progress and to evaluate the effectiveness of the plans for the child and family. 10. Promote education in regular schools with peers who have typical hearing and with appropriate services from early childhood onwards. Auditory Verbal (AV) therapy is a well-established method for children with hearing impairment in North America and Australia, though not widely practiced in the UK. This approach relies heavily on developing listening in children before spoken language can be developed. The core aim is to develop listening in children who make use of hearing aids that are triggered by different frequency rages of sounds. Engaging a child’s auditory attention is crucial in listening (as opposed to hearing) and speech (Rhoades, 200). This therapy in this case was made available to low income families. During this process, professional advice is submitted in light of different cultures, values and views. The information is unbiased and detailed. Investigation by Hogan et al. (2008) revealed some outcome for those with hearing impairment in the UK. This was done for a group of 37 children with hearing impairment who attended AV therapy every week for a minimum of one year. Hogan et al. (2008) reported on an increase in Rate of Language Development (RLD) for the children from 0.5 to 1.3 with the children not in an intensive part of the therapy. As per this therapy the low income families, through the funded project called Reach Out, offered this service at no fee to up to 12 families. Out of this, an investigation came about to see the relationship between household income and and consistent outcomes from A.V therapy. This package also did not differ from the package of A.V therapy offered to other families who already existed in the program but had partially funded for the A.V therapy (Rhoades, 200). The study looked at spoken language outcomes of children with families with learning impairment for low income families with atleast one year AV therapy. The children on the reach out study showed a highly significant improvement in terms of RLD (Rate of Language Development). The core of the AV therapy is that parents are the primary agents of change and the intervention was aimed at coaching parents to facilitate the child’s spoken language development using the prescribed AV techniques (AG Bell Academy 2007) The intervention as conducted by qualified and competent therapists, grounded in sufficient knowledge base driven by achieving set targets within a realistic time frame. Working directly with parents has been one of the factors that has supported rapid increase in the rates of language development observed in children from the Reach Out project; with their involvement as the primary agents of change. The presence of qualified personnel who made use of parents’ presence also played a key role in the rapid increase in long language development as the parents were comfortable with this. According to Bamford et al. (2009), parents preffered professional support to enable them to work more effectively with their child, rather than a child-focused intervention (Rhoades, 200). The AV therapy itself has fundamental influence to the rate of language development. The AV approach examines the child’s access and responses to sound and the resulting information is assessed by the child’s audiologist. Furthermore, close observations are made of the child’s level of attention, understanding, utterances, motor skills and mode of play. All observations are disclosed to parents with progress in terms of listening and speaking from subsequent sessions. If no progress is arrived, pertinent factors are reassessed that may cause this. It is also noted that AV therapy and other extrinsic factors such as cochlear implants at any early age affects the speech language and literacy in children positively. This would be a sound road to be taken up by parents due to the evidenced benefits (Rhoades, 200). Universal newborn hearing screening (units) and early detection of deafness Introduction of UNHS has aimed at giving parents information of their child’s haring loss within the first weeks of that child’s life. According to Young and Tattersall (2007), parents are positive about 3early detection. However two mothers, out of the experiment they conducted, felt that it prevented them form enjoying their babies (Esposito, 2009). However to argue this out, the mind set is just what needs to be altered by mothers and fathers alike, not forgetting the whole family, and the baby’s play time and growth will be enjoyed as was desired before the detection. In this study, there was an important issue which came up as parents having a difficult time to cope without having had a previous experience. This can be argued in terms of difference of each child’s personality and that the family set up in such a time is what will essentially make acceptance and coping with this situation easier (Esposito, 2009). Moreover, since the two siblings will be born at different times, different measures will be used to counsel the family, which may make the detection an outstanding an outstanding new process to start with. According to Luterman, Kurtzer and Seewald (1999) and Yoshingo-Itano (2000), it is important to remember that each child’s main personality comes into play as does any additional disabilities and family circumstances. The study by Young and Tattersall (2007) was to examine the impact early identification of deafness had on the family members’ emotional response to diagnosis and communication expectations for their child. This interview involved 27 families. The authors believed that there are four major areas of change in the diagnosis of infant deafness brought about by UNHS. They are: i) Changed discovery mechanism ii) Highly compressed time scale from birth to identification iii) Identification of hearing loss is much easier in the child-parent relationship iv) Early intervention has essentially become part of the birth process The very nature of this research has strong ties to the first principle of Auditory Verbal practice in that it investigates UNHS and promotes early diagnosis of hearing loss and deafness. This is supported by Yoshinaga-Itano (2000). Parental involvement is highlighted as crucial, especially if the Auditory Verbal (AV) therapy exists. Some parents will believe that by finding out early about their children’s hearing impairment, the visions and hopes of their children could be tailored to that disability. This is in contrast to the seventh and tenth principle of Auditory Verbal practice (A.G Bell Academy, 2007). Parents may go wrong in some way by having this early detection in order to tailor their children’s future in line with this instead of letting things reveal themselves as time passes and the child grows up to make such decisions of his life on his own, but with their support and not them shoving ideas down his throat. This goes as towards a measure, as stated by Young and Tattersall, by parents that will mean their children will be normal. It is important for parents to realize that their child will learn as a deaf child and will need different learning environments (Rhoades, 200). Reference: Anna Esposito, (2009). Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and the Biometric .Issue IOS Press. Ellen A. Rhoades, (200). Auditory-Verbal Practice: Toward a Family-Centered Approach. Charles C Thomas. Read More