Hearing Health Across All Ages: Protecting Kids, Teens, and Seniors

By Your Health Magazine

Listen up! Hearing is everything, and it’s important to do as much as we can to protect it. Navigating the world around us is much more difficult when you’re down a sense—it’s vital for communication and any damage can be very noticeable and difficult to reverse. Hearing health often gets overlooked in favour of other senses, like sight, but hearing loss can be devastating and affect anyone from children to seniors. Different life stages come with different risk factors and outcomes, and by understanding these a little better and taking proactive measures, we can preserve the quality of our hearing for a lifetime of listening. Staying up-to-date with hearing health knowledge is important in many fields, including healthcare. Family Nurse Practitioners (FNPs) in further education degrees, such as an online post-masters FNP program, can equip themselves with skills to address hearing-related issues across patients of all ages.

Protecting Kid’s Hearing: Strong Foundations, Big Results

Hearing is important when children are developing their speech patterns and cementing verbal communication skills; important for social and educational progression. At this stage, even minor hearing loss can delay developmental patterns, which can lead to academic struggles because of insufficient language skills. But how can it happen? It may surprise you, but toys with sirens or musical components can be very loud, sometimes exceeding 85 decibels. To put it into perspective, that’s as loud as a lawnmower, and prolonged exposure without adequate hearing protection can cause hearing damage. Children love holding things up to their ears, too, so even a phone on maximum volume could hurt a child’s developing hearing if held at a certain distance for an extended period of time.

Kids get sick a lot because their immune systems are getting used to all of the viruses and bacteria floating around that they haven’t encountered before. As a result, ear infections can be common—so make sure you monitor for a child tugging at their ear, and make sure that you and your children practice good hygiene. Remember, nothing smaller than your elbow should be going inside of your ear, and that includes Q-Tips!

Teens: Safe Listening Habits for Long-Term Hearing Health

You can probably guess where this section is heading: music. Concerts, headphones, earbuds, AirPods, parties—they’re all lots of fun, but the potential hearing damage from carelessness can follow teens for life. In fact, 1 in 8 children between 6 and 19 have hearing loss as a direct result of music blasting too loud through earbuds or headphones. A great way to combat this is to place volume limits on headphone usage and talk to your teens about why it’s a good idea to keep this setting in place. Investing in a solid pair of noise-cancelling headphones can help, too, as sometimes volumes are turned up to drown out outside noise.

Seniors: Addressing the Inevitable

As we age, parts of our body will start to wear down with use. Hearing loss becomes more prevalent and obvious as we get older, with a third of older adults experiencing some sort of hearing decline. Catching this hearing loss early can improve outcomes significantly, as doctors or specialists like audiologists can give specialized advice on how to maximize the lifespan of your inner ear. For example, if you’ve been exposed to loud noises due to work or lifestyle, making a change is never too late to slow decline. Intervening with hearing aids or other assistive devices is also an option and can massively improve quality of life, especially if you’re finding that your hearing loss is affecting your day-to-day life.

Hearing health matters at every stage of life. Nobody is too tough to wear hearing protection, just like nobody is too tough to wear sunscreen. Small, yet considered preventative measures are important to maintain health across generations, and these little adjustments can lead to massive results in the long term. So lower the volume, see a doctor, and put earplugs in at that concert, because hearing is a privilege, not a right. You might find yourself wishing for it one day, and it’s important to listen now before you can’t hear later.