When you have good hearing, it’s easy to take normal everyday sounds for granted without even realizing it.

However, for someone with hearing loss, developing listening skills takes practice. Even the beep of a microwave or the tweet of a bird can be totally new and surprising.

If you have a deaf child with a hearing aid or cochlear implant, I’m sure you’re used to visiting centres for speech and listening therapies. As helpful as those structured sessions are for developing listening skills, sometimes it’s easy for little ones to get bored and switch off because it’s a forced activity.

So here’s how we practice listening skills:

Get Outside

Lately, I have found that going for a simple walk outdoors and talking about all the different noises we can hear has proven to be more effective for Harry’s listening skills than anything else we have tried. Try stomping through a pile of crunchy leaves this fall and watch your child’s reaction to the rustling sound it makes. You could talk about the difference between the noise of a dry autumnal leaf as opposed to a fresh green leaf on a tree.

Harry and I like to sit on a bench watching different vehicles go past, and we talk about how a bus or truck make a ‘big noisy sound’, whereas a car is quiet and a bicycle, even quieter.

Go Shopping

I know going to a supermarket with a pre-schooler can be most parents’ idea of hell, but why not turn it into a listening experience?

Harry’s favorite thing to do is to listen to the cashier ‘bleeping’ the shopping at the checkout. I also like to ask Harry to go and get me apples or the milk and put them in the basket to test his listening abilities.

In the Car

There are so many different sounds in the car: the turn signals, horn, sirens whizzing past, and music coming through the speakers. I always used to worry that Harry would be overwhelmed in the car with all of these noises going on around him, but he has always really loved it.

We talk about things in and around the car and Harry often asks me. “What’s that?” when he hears a new sound.

At Home

Of course, you don’t actually have to go anywhere to have a listening experience, as there are hundreds of noises to hear in the comfort of your own home. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen and Harry loves sitting and waiting for the microwave to ‘ping’.

You could talk about the noise of a boiling kettle, or running water; what sausages sound like when they are sizzling in a pan, or the sound when toasts pops out of the toaster.

The first-ever placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trial of hearing aid outcomes published today in the American Journal of Audiology shows that older adults benefit from hearing aid use.

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We consider hearing a gift. Each day we see  faces light up with joy as people hear sounds they are hearing for the first time in years. But even we find a few noises – an ambulance squealing down the street or the sound of teenager’s ringtone – so awful we sometimes wish we could program hearing aids (and ears!) to tune them out completely.

According to science, we’re not alone. In 2007, one British researcher went on a quest to uncover the most cringeworthy sounds on earth, according to people from across the globe. To start, University of Salford Professor of Acoustic Engineering Trevor J. Cox rounded up 34 horrible sounds, ranging from the whir of the dental drill to the smack of a cat eating. Next he put them online through a scientific survey that collected participants’ demographic data and allowed them to rank each sound. After one year and more than 1.1 million responses, the results were presented in a scientific paper presented at 19th International Congress on Acoustics.

And the worst sound in the world?

1. Vomiting

It may help to know that the sound in the study was actually a re-creation involving an actor, a bucket, and a can of baked beans. Still, the sound easily beat out fingernails on a chalkboard (a surprisingly low #16) to rank as the worst sound around thanks to the universal disgust it triggers in people across the globe.

Researchers say our revulsion may be an innate survival mechanism. If one member of a tribe shows signs of having ingested something harmful, sympathetic disgust can help others who ate the same thing expel it before they become ill.

Here’s what else made it to the top of the unfortunate heap. Turn up your speakers and see if you agree.

2. Microphone feedback

The concert-ruining squeal of audio feedback ranks high on the cringe list. Some scientists say this one also goes back to our evolutionary heritage. They speculate high-pitched squeals sound a like monkey warning calls, setting our primate brains on edge.

3. Crying Babies

Think one baby crying is bad? Try three or four.

Multiple babies crying outranked a solitary one, which still clocked in at number eight. Interestingly, men found a baby’s cry to be worse than women, who Cox speculates may be more habituated to the noise.

4. Train Scraping on Tracks

Not exactly music to the ears, is it?

5. Metal-on-Metal Squeaking 

The study used the sound of a squeaky seesaw to test a slightly less dramatic version of metal-on-metal. And no surprise, it’s grating.

Other sounds that made the top ten include badly played violin, a flatulent whoopee cushion, a single baby crying, soap opera argument, and electrical humming.

– See more at: https://www.connecthearing.com/blog/worst-sound-in-the-world/#sthash.oA0t8rUy.dpuf