Welcome back to All About Audiology, the podcast that’s, well, all about audiology; with resources and information to empower you wherever you are on your hearing journey or the hearing journey of your child, family member or someone you love. I’m your host Dr. Lilach Saperstein and in today’s episode we are going to be talking about your child’s audiology appointment. What can you expect for their appointment and how can you help prepare them for an audiology appointment or hearing test.

In last week’s episode we spoke about adults hearing test and different tips for preparing for that as an adult but for children the testing is very different and preparing for the appointment will be different as well.

The first important thing to understand is that we have different kinds of tests in audiology in order to test hearing. Some tests are automatic and help us get an understanding of the health of the ear and the functioning of the ear without a person having to be involved. The second kind of tests are subjective and do require your child’s participation. When children are very, very young infants then we can only test them with the automatic tests, either an “OAE” or an “ABR”.

There are a lot of acronyms in audiology and I’ll just take a minute to explain what they mean. OAE stands for Otoacoustic Emissions Test and this is a very brief test where a little earphone is placed in the baby’s ear, sounds go in the ear and the healthy ear will take in those sounds and will actually produce a kind of an echo or a result that can be detected by the microphones in the OAE device. So we can have a very quick screening that can take just a few seconds in each ear that can tell us if that ear is functioning properly and if the outer hair cells respond to sound.

The second type of test we use on babies is the ABR, Auditory Brainstem Response and it’s sometimes called the BAER, Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response. This test includes putting electrodes on the babies forehead and behind their ears and then presenting sounds in through an earphone. This actually is measuring the electrical activity of their eighth nerve, of their auditory nerve and to see if there is activity at the level of the eighth nerve and the brain stem, meaning they can hear the sounds. The OAE and ABR are often used as screenings for newborns hearing screening in the first 24 to 48 hours of life and any babies that do not pass these screenings are passed on for further testing.

Now I’d like to talk to you more about how we do the behavioral testing for toddlers and young children. There are two basic ways of testing young children that are split into the younger category and a little bit of an older category. This is not a hard definition and it depends on the child’s age; not just their age of how old they are, but really on their developmental abilities. The first method called, Visual Reinforcement Audiometry, is used for children ranging from 6 months to two years of age. The second method called, Conditioned Play Audiometry is used for children from the age of 2 to about the age of 5, but really these two methods can be used whenever appropriate for the patient.

Now testing young children’s hearing can be an exciting challenge for an audiologist because each child requires a unique approach. The goal is for them to feel like it’s a game and not a test and to get the child motivated to focus, attend, listen and perform the task you are asking them to do. The task, for example, can be filling a peg board with pegs or throwing sand bags into a bucket or building a tower of blo...