My Hearing Loss and Me: We Get Along Most of the Time

It is very difficult for teachers and parents to understand the psychosocial effects of hearing loss on young children. This book can help all of us better understand the world from the point of view of a child with a hearing loss.

This is a story about a young boy who has a cochlear implant. He attends a mainstream school and is the only child in his family with a hearing loss.

This book describes his experiences in life highlighting how his hearing loss affects those experiences. In almost all the situations described in this book, the young boy, Jack, is involved in a conversation with someone. Conversations with his parents, his brothers, his speech language therapists, his playmates, and others are all presented in this book.

Sometimes the conversations are not successful immediately. But all the conversations eventually succeed because Jack, the main character, receives help from someone. Sometimes Jack is able to help himself. Other times, he receives some support and encouragement from his parents to help get through a communication breakdown that occurred in some way.

In this story, Jack uses a cochlear implant. The reader will have to decide how well he thinks Jack seems to be doing with the cochlear implant. The author's intent is not to evaluate the success or failure of the cochlear implant. Rather, the author is trying to focus on how well Jack is able to do in a world where everyone else around Jack has normal hearing. It is the author's belief that Jack does quite well in this world.

It is the author's belief that conversations about a child's experiences having a hearing loss in mainstream schools is vital to the child's feeling of belonging to this world. These experiences are not limited to the challenges that the child might have to overcome. It also includes the experiences where the child did well and feels happy about it.

It is the author's hope that this book helps you have the conversations that you would like to have with those who are a part of your life.

John Anderson was born with normal hearing. At the age of three, he began to lose his hearing and was diagnosed as having a moderate inner ear loss. The etiology of the hearing loss was unknown. At the age of 4, he began to wear a body worn hearing aid with amplification in his right ear. Later, it was found that he had lost more hearing and the nature of the loss was determined to be progressive. While attending mainstream schools, he received weekly speech therapy during his elementary school years. He did not have access to FM systems nor did he use interpreters of any kind. He earned his high school diploma in 1967 and went on to college earning a bachelor degree in data processing in 1971. He went on to earn his masters in business administration in 1973 and began a career in computer programming. When he was in his early 30Õs, he lost the remainder of his hearing. At the age of 35, he received a cochlear implant and has been using it successfully for the last 19 years.

After regaining some of his hearing through the cochlear implant, he began to think about a career change to the field of counseling. He did make that change, earning a masters degree in counseling psychology in 1997, and has worked for the last six years as an adjustment counselor for the Mainstream Center at Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton MA, where he works with children with hearing loss who attend public schools.

William Bushell is an artist and illustrator living and working in Victoria, BC, on Canada's west coast. He has illustrated and designed books for several authors internationally.