/
RSS Feed
Today we tackle our final sense, the sense of hearing, and how autistic children may react differently to sound than their neurotypical peers. We discuss the importance of completing a hearing evaluation as well as some adjustments or accommodations you can make to help your child cope.
Hearing Voices
Show Notes for Embracing Autism Podcast — Ep. 206
Introduction:
Lia: In this episode, we tackle our final sense the sense of hearing and how autistic children may react differently to sound than their neurotypical peers. We discussed the importance of completing a hearing evaluation, as well as some adjustments or accommodations you can make to help your child cope.
Lia: Welcome to Embracing Autism, a podcast for parents of autistic children seeking advice and support while spreading awareness and acceptance of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Lia: I’m Lia!
Matt: And I’m Matt!
Lia: And each week, we’ll discuss our journey with autism and talk about how to embrace your child’s individuality while providing guidance, tips, resources and sharing our personal stories. This is —
Lia & Matt: Embracing Autism!
Discussion:
Lia: Hi, all so today we’re going to be talking about our final sense, the sense of hearing, this is the final, I guess, official sense, because I’m not sure the other ones count as senses.
Matt: Yeah, we’ll stop at five and not do the sixth sense.
Lia: Let’s not do that one, that might be a little creepy. But yeah, our kids don’t have the ability to see ghosts. I don’t think… maybe I guess we’ll find out.
Matt: They are too young to notify us one way or the other.
Lia: Yeah, researchers are out on whether or not there’s a correlation with seeing ghosts and autism. So well, we’ll keep you guys posted if new studies come out.
Matt: Oh lord.
Lia: But we’re talking about the sense of hearing, which is kind of interesting for us, because we have the two kids that are similar in some areas when it comes to the sense of hearing, and then they’re very different in other areas.
Matt: Yeah, I would say that there is quite an overlap in their sensitivities. But not all the way I kind of think of like a Venn diagram, essentially, that we have the two kids and then their kind of overlapping areas of sensitivity. And then the drastic change that might affect one but wouldn’t necessarily affect the other. So I mean, a perfect example for this is they both are not huge fans of like the vacuum, for example, our oldest is absolutely terrified where the thought of the vacuum she’s off running, as were the youngest one, she’s nervous around the vacuum but doesn’t go off hiding. So I think that’s one of the examples where they both don’t like the concept of the vacuum or the loud noise that it creates. But then at the same time, there are other noises that one would tolerate better.
Lia: There’s like a combination of the over sensitivities and the under sensitivities. And again, this is why autism is such a spectrum because both of our girls are diagnosed but what exactly sets them off is not necessarily the same and they do overlap in some areas. So like one example that we had with our kid is the oldest one was absolutely terrified of any sort of toy that made any sort of noises. So for the longest time, we could not have any sort of electronic toys whatsoever. Or if they were electronic, we had to make sure it didn’t have batteries or was turned off because it would completely set her off. That like sudden jarring electronic noise or sound — she would freak out and have a total meltdown. Whereas our other kid actually seemed to be attracted to that. So like, for example, when you think of those books that you like, push buttons in and they make sounds, I’m not sure what those are called.
Matt: Audio sound effect book?
Lia: A sound effect book? I don’t know, people are gonna be laughing at us. Basically, with those books, one of my kids, the youngest one, she would love it. She would almost stim on it, where she’d be pushing the same sound over and over and over and over and kind of like enjoying and laughing.
Matt: And the oldest would basically be crying and yelling, begging her sister to stop it.
Lia: Yeah the other one would be crying and like hiding and like trying to get it to stop. So it can be problematic if you have multiple children who are autistic, because they can kind of set each other off when one needs an input that the other person is averse to. And that’s like a unique challenge that we’ve run into.
Matt: And then on the flip side of that, the youngest one will be singing in the car, and her older sister does not want her singing under any circumstances. So she’ll be kind of telling her to stop singing. So it kind of goes both ways, essentially, of how it kind of interacts with sound.
Lia: I mean, and then it goes the other way, too. It’s like it’s almost like they tag team with each other on setting each other off. Because then the oldest one, the older one has gotten in the habit of wanting to like verbally stim a lot where she’s like screaming are shrieking really loudly, just like for fun. Like she laughs afterwards. She thinks it’s like a good sense…
Matt: A game.
Lia: Yeah, it’s like auditory input for her. Like she likes the sound of it. And the youngest one is very sound-sensitive to that sort of pitch. So she honestly has to have these noise reduction ear muffs on all the time, whenever we’re on car rides, because that’s when the oldest one likes to scream more often. It totally triggers the youngest ones like she’ll start crying. She starts just freaking out and kind of getting emotional. So it’s kind of interesting to see how they’re very opposite in certain areas, but yet they’re both scared of like, a dog barking loudly.
Matt: Yeah, so I would definitely recommend as far as like having some type of like ear muffs. I mean, I feel like that is absolutely crucial because sometimes we’ll be somewhere — in the car, for example — and our oldest is being loud. We’ll see like our youngest kind of covering her ears just trying to block out the sound. So yeah, we definitely found that we need multiple sets of ear muffs kind of scattered throughout the house, car, everywhere just if we need to kind of pull out a pair to kind of put on her just to help a little bit that makes all the difference in the world.
Lia: Yeah, we’ve kind of learned that you can never really have too many noise-cancelling headsets like, honestly, or noise reduction. Honestly, we have like three pairs and we feel like that’s not enough. And we’re like in the market to get more because we have some in the car, we need some of that house.
Matt: We have some in the bedroom.
Lia: Yeah, we obviously need some in the bedroom, because sometimes the older one will scream during their nap time and trigger the other one.
Matt: Right, so we have been trying to find ways to allow the oldest one still to get the sensation that she needs, but then not completely disturb or disrupt the younger one. So I think of the one helpful thing that we had tried, and it kind of works sometimes is the cup that she’s able to kind of scream into the cup.
Lia: Yeah.
Matt: So that kind of allows her to kind of get the sound that she wants, because she still has the vibration and the impact of the sound. But then it’s also not disturbing her little sister.
Lia: Yeah.
Matt: But then that’s kind of a hit or miss if she decides to do that.
Lia: Yeah, so that was kind of like a workaround that we did is like if you have a kid who’s a screamer, one of the things that we came up with is getting like one of those red solo cups, for example, the bigger ones and just hand it to her whenever she feels the need to scream, and then we tell her to put it over her mouth and scream into the cup, and she can scream pretty loudly in that and it muffles the sound. So she still has the ability to do that and she just won’t trigger her sister as much. It does also give a little bit of like a vibration feedback because the cup is up against your mouth in your face. So if you’re yelling into it, you also do get a little bit of that like vibration sensory on your face, too.
Matt: Right? So I didn’t think that she actually liked it when we showed her that it’s just if she’s in the mood is there like a cup that she has around her? Otherwise, you have to go to track one down or try and make sure the other one has headset on.
Lia: Yeah, absolutely. Interesting things about hearing in autism is that they can have difficulty with hearing and a lot of times they are over-sensitivities or under-sensitivities. So one of the challenging areas in that is that sometimes children have difficulty blocking out other sounds. So if they’re over sensitive to sound, it’s kind of like if there’s a dog barking, if there’s a bird going off, sometimes it can also affect their ability to concentrate or pay attention to what you’re saying, because they’re too hyper-focused on that sound like that sound becomes a very distracting sound to them. Whereas neurotypical people can just learn to tune that out.
Matt: I mean, maybe that’s one of the cases because I’m thinking of like, when we’re taking our girls to the car, and I’m talking to our oldest, and she is talking to me about all — I’m saying one thing to her — and she’s telling me that she’s like, listening to the birds, essentially, that are making noise. And I’m like, well, I’m much closer to you trying to have like a conversation about like, oh, what colors do you see like in the trees, and she’s telling me like she’s hearing the birds. So it’s like completely ignoring what I’m saying. But finding another sound to kind of catch on to.
Lia: Yeah, I’ve noticed that when we’re putting the kids into the car, a lot of times, she’ll have this like zoned-out look on her face. And when I pay attention, I kind of start looking around, I’m like, is she looking at something? It doesn’t seem like she’s looking at anything, she’s just kind of spacing out. And then I realize it’s because she is trying to listen to the birds and the trees outside.
Matt: Right.
Lia: So like, that’s actually kind of a good point there is that sometimes we might think that they’re not paying attention, but it’s that they’re just hyper-focused on something else right there and it can be auditory input.
Matt: Right, and I mean, she would mentioned leaves or trees or dancing or something when she’s paying attention to the wind. So just interesting that even though you’re trying to probably engage in a conversation with them, or say their name, and they’re not giving you anything back, it might not be that they’re choosing to ignore you, but something else has fixated their attention, and that they’re zoning in on that with their audio.
Lia: And there’s like a bunch of different components to hearing when it comes to like the auditory system and autism. A few things that come to mind when it comes to autism are things like auditory cluttering. It can be kind of like anxiety-inducing to some autistic individuals, because of that difficulty with filtering and processing sounds like we just mentioned. So that means that for some autistic individuals, that can actually be a painful experience. I don’t have any particular studies on that. But just based off of the studies, we’ve heard from the other senses, I would imagine that it would also probably show that pain experience in the brain like it did with the other senses. That would be my assumption.
Matt: I was going to say — I mean, since it’s so prevalent, and all the others it’d be weird if it was the outlier.
Lia: I would be willing to bet that there’s research out there that probably verifies that but don’t take my word for it. Do a Google, Google Scholar search, not Google. But then there’s also the over-sensitivity to sound so they can have really painful reactions to alarms, things like bursting balloons. Oh my gosh, our older one really had a hard time with that one.
Matt: But then the youngest one loves it and then tries —
Lia: Oh my gosh.
Matt: — and sits on the balloon. So again, here we go again, with sending the other one into a meltdown of sorts.
Lia: Exactly. Like our oldest one hates popping balloons, like she gets so scared of it, but the youngest one absolutely loves it and will intentionally try to pop balloons.
Matt: Because she’s small, so she’ll use it as like her own bouncy ball and then bounce and then of course it’ll pop.
Lia: Yeah, exactly. And then things like banging doors and dogs barking, those were the first things we noticed with our oldest one was she was as young as like, what, three, four months old?
Matt: Yeah, she was only four months old and there was a dog that was barking next door to wherever we were and I remember she was absolutely terrified of the dog. And I mean, that’s understandable. Because I mean, it was it was a large dog kind of barking kind of close to her. And I mean, think that was her first time that she’s ever had any type of exposure to a dog. But we still see that even today, like, we went to the park today and there were two small little dogs that were kind of walking around just going on a walk. And she wanted nothing to do with the dogs. But then the youngest one wanted to run over and pet the dogs. So I mean, even that, that’s three years later, and she still has that disconnect from any type of dog.
Lia: Yeah, exactly. And then there’s like the under-sensitivity side, our youngest one, she, for example, I think, for the most part tends to be under-sensitive to sound because she has always even to this day had a really slow response to her name and getting her attention. We’ve always considered whether or not she had hearing problems or anything like that, until we eventually got her tested. But it’s kind of different for each autistic person in the sense that there’s people like our older child who’s super hypersensitive, and will react really quickly. And then there’s others that need more auditory input to get a reaction. So these are the types of people who would probably prefer to listen to music really, really loud. So I know some people that like when they’re listening to music in their earbuds, you can hear the music really loudly from the outside, and you can make out the lyrics, everything and all of that. And it’s because they need a higher volume to get the same auditory input that a neurotypical person would probably be able to get at like a normal lower volume setting.
Matt: Right. I was gonna say, I mean, as far as getting the attention of our youngest one, I think that that can still be a struggle. I mean, at least it’s still struggle for us. I guess, what would you say is the best approach that you have with getting our youngest one attention? I think for, for me, I think us trying to turn it into kind of a bit of a game kind of gets a better reaction than just us repeatedly calling her name if she’s kind of zoning out or listening to something else. So I think for us, if we turn it into like a song where we kind of tell her to like turn around or something, so we’ll kind of incorporate her name into the song and then suddenly, it kind of pulls her back a little bit where she hears something that she likes, because it’s kind of a song that she loves music. So when she hears the song, she’s pulled back, and then she hears her name and then she realizes that we’re trying to call her.
Lia: Well, the thing that I’ve learned through occupational therapists that kind of go along with that is that you tend to need to use things that are like high-reward, and whatever that thing is, depends on your specific child. So like for our oldest child, initially, she also didn’t respond to her name. For her, the high reward was giving her a ton of praise. We would kind of get in her face a little bit when we call her name so that she would know that, oh, when we’re calling your name, we’re trying to get your attention. And then we would just praise her like, oh, yeah, good job, that sort of thing. And she was very responsive to that, she loves having praise.
Matt: And it was also like, tickling her so she would be like laughing. So she would get the idea that, oh, when I respond, when they call my name, I get tickles. And she’s happy with the end result of actually responding to her name.
Lia: Right. But that didn’t work very well, for the younger one. The younger one, the reward system for her is different because she is more of a gross motor kid and so for her, the reward system that we had to use was more motion-driven or activity-driven or things like that. So it’s been harder with her, it’s still kind of like a struggle to get her to respond to her name most of the time, but we’ve made some improvement in that area by switching it to that sort of motion, gross-motor type of incentivizing.
Matt: Right, kind of the red light green light of sorts to kind of get her to redirect her body’s motion. And then she likes essentially kind of responding back.
Lia: Exactly. And then when the sense of hearing, it’s not just limited specifically to hearing the sounds, it’s also understanding the sounds you’re processing. So with autism, sometimes there can be difficulties in processing and understanding sounds, I believe, that’s called auditory agnosia. That basically means that for example, if they hear a sound, they need to then be taught the association with that sound. So like, let’s say that they’re in school, and they hear the bell ring, they need to then be taught that when the bell rings, that means that’s the time that you get up and go to your next class. It’s not necessarily intuitive. So there’s kind of like an auditory process like disconnect there between hearing the sound and then processing the meaning behind the sound. I thought that was interesting.
Matt: I just thinking. I mean, the example that you gave me that makes perfect sense. I think about like our elementary schools, sometimes the bell would mean something for us and sometimes it was a bell for other kids to come inside, which had no bearing on anything that we were doing. So it was like certain times of the day, the same exact bell could mean totally different things depending on what time of day it is. So unless you’re actually taught to incorporate, which I mean, most kids that kind of follow the flow of everything, but unless you’re actually taught what that individual bell means, at specific times, you would be completely clueless as to what it’s actually meant to be.
Lia: Exactly. And that can be difficult just for any kid. So just imagine how difficult it must be for somebody who has a processing disorder on top of that when it comes to understanding that information. So usually, you just got to give people a little bit more time, give them more examples, give them maybe visual stories or something like that to help them process what that means. And I think usually repetition helps with that too, kind of like a fire drill where you just practice before you do the actual thing. So maybe doing some sort of like drills where you practice, when you hear this sound, it means this. You could always turn that into a game to I would think. Another thing that falls in line with the auditory system. And autism is called meaning deafness. It’s kind of related to the auditory agnosia. But this is like auditory verbal agnosia. So the other one is just being able to process and understand sounds, that’s the auditory agnosia. But auditory verbal agnosia is going beyond that, and understanding what the language itself means. So in autism, that can be difficult as well. So that’s kind of correlated with like the speech, the receptive, expressive speech stuff in the sense that you have to be able to use like, short, direct sentences, so that they can process the meaning behind it easier than if you gave them a complex sentence. So that’s, again, part of that sort of processing where your ear is bringing the information in but there’s some point where there’s kind of a disconnect with the hearing part of the brain. So you have to kind of give them a little more time, give them a little less information, more bite-sized pieces, so that they can kind of get that to process a little more smoothly.
Matt: So in a way that would be kind of related to what we talked about in the speech episode, where we had very short, brief sentences that we would practice with our daughters to say when they were trying to make a request. So we would teach them to say “I want chips”, for example, instead of having a more complex sentence of “oh, can I please have a bag of chips, I’m really hungry, blah, blah, blah”.
Lia: That’s a long sentence for a 2-year-old.
Matt: But yeah I mean she’s polite, because she says, please. So I would imagine it’s kind of similar with that but instead of being a speech component, it’s more the hearing components so kind of on the flip side, in a way?
Lia: Yeah, exactly. So it’s basically like, the reason you did that under the speech area was because of a receptive processing issue. But the reason you’re doing it in the hearing areas, more of an auditory processing issue. So it’s kind of like a similar means to a different end.
Matt: So it’s like the opposite side of the coin.
Lia: Kind of — Yeah, of a five-sided coin?
Matt: Sure, a die — let’s say a five-sided die.
Lia: That’d be a weird die. Yes. But anyway, back on track. So that was really interesting. And then the other thing that I learned about is something called tonal agnosia, which is like tonal deafness. And that basically means that some autistic individuals struggle with the ability to pick up tone. And this is also part of hearing somebody’s inflection in their voice or emphasis in certain words. There’s actually I think, in the autism tests, that’s some of the questions that they asked.
Matt: So essentially, it’d be them potentially struggling to pick up sarcasm, if they’re talking to a peer. So if a peer was to say like, “No, I’m not hungry”, clearly, meaning that they’re very hungry, I wasn’t sure if that means that they might struggle with the inflection that it means the opposite.
Lia: Exactly. Or like things like hyperbole when there’s like an exaggeration in what you’re saying, or it could also be like, when you add an emphasis to a word to give it another meeting. Like if you say, “Hey, look over there”, and you say it kind of like ‘there’ like, secretly, and then the person might be like, what look where you’re like, over there, like, they might not get that, you know. So it’s kind of like the version of like, when you point to something with your eyes, because you want to be discreet, and the other person picks up on it. This is kind of like the audio version of that, where it’s like you’re speaking something in a certain tone, or a certain emphasis or certain way and that is giving a second layer of meaning to what you’re saying. So if you’re not able to understand that second layer, meaning you’re more likely to take it very literally.
Matt: Okay, that makes sense.
Lia: So that’s called tonal deafness, because it’s like, specifically related to like the tone and inflection in the person’s voice and how they’re emphasizing things. And I think it goes both ways. So I think it’s both a matter of not being able to pick it up when other people are doing it, but also not necessarily being able to do it yourself. So it’s very common and autistic individuals part of the diagnosis process is they’ll ask and see if the person has a monotone voice, for example. And that tends to be common to where people say that — monotonal is kind of like robotic. So sometimes there is no inflection. You don’t speak with like a natural rhythm. It might just be more I think of like NPR.
Matt: Oh, yeah, pretty much.
Lia: Yeah, I kind of like that monotone type of news anchor voice.
Matt: Which I guess makes sense. If the understanding behind the hidden meaning in the language is kind of something that you’re not understanding, then you wouldn’t engage in that because it would be kind of irrelevant.
Lia: And none of this is to say that autistic individuals experience all of these things or even any of these things. These are just a bunch of different examples of different experiences that some autistic individuals have reported. But again, every person is different. So they might not necessarily have any of these or they could have many of these or a mix. So because of these hearing impairments that are possible or these sensitivities, oftentimes it’s recommended for autistic individuals to go to an audiologist for hearing tests. For our children’s autism evaluations, they actually asked us if they had their hearing tested prior to the assessments. So we did actually get them both assessed. Cool tip there, if your kid has not gotten assessed yet, the local public school system, at least in the United States, does free audiology tests. So we were able to get both of our children tested for free through the public school system.
Matt: We did them — must have been before they were two I would imagine, right?
Lia: Yes. And they do have like a kid version of an audiology test. So if you’re just curious, I can describe it really quickly. I had my child and we went into like this soundproof booth, and I had her on my lap. And then what they have on the two corners of the walls is they have a toy, and a light and the toy, I think it was like, maybe like a clown with cymbals or something like that. It’s kind of creepy, but I let them know in advance that my children were likely autistic, and very sensitive to sudden noises and sudden movement. So they were very understanding of that and they turned that component off, because usually the toy is used as a reward, so that if your child looks in the correct direction of where the sound came from, the toy is there and the toy will like make noises to reward them. But for autistic kids that can have the opposite effect.
Matt: I mean, if it was a clown, even like you think like normal kids, it’s almost like a punishment.
Lia: Yeah, it honestly reminded me a little bit of like a Jack in the Box, like it kind of was — because it would pop up, it kind of is like a Jack in the Box. Yeah, so it was, I think it was creepy, but that’s what they’re using. So what they do is they put the kid in there, it’s kind of a really weird experience because it is completely soundproof. So when you go in there for a hot second, you kind of feel like you’re deaf, because you don’t hear anything at all. It’s very unnerving. But you hold your kid in your lap, and then they’ll do different pitches of sound. So they’ll do different types of sounds, they’ll do different volumes of sounds. And they’re basically just gauging to see whether your kid turns their gaze towards where their sound is coming from. And that’s how they know with toddlers and infants whether or not they’re able to hear the sound.
Matt: And I remember, I wasn’t actually in the booth with you but I was like helping them get her to respond one way or the other. So I remember, they were asking as far as like, is there anything that she’s interested in, so I was like giving them certain nursery rhymes to say certain lines to see if they would kind of get her to turn her head one way or the other to show that she’s actually able to hear the song because I mean, at that age, I mean, she was so young, her language ability was almost nonexistent.
Lia: Since many kids on the spectrum have that whole receptive, expressive issue, that was one of the things that kind of fell in place with audiology exam too is that they will use phrases or questions that the child needs to respond to. But if you have a child who like ours at the time was very non-responsive, we had to get creative and we talked to the audiologist and kind of fed her things that we knew our child would react to, because it was a special interest of hers. So if you have a good audiologist, you can talk to them and let them know like, hey, they don’t understand questions, but they will fill in the blanks to like this story, if you read a line from it, or they’ll fill in the blanks to this song. That way, you know that they heard the sound, because they’re responding to it by filling in the blank. So if there’s anything like that, that works for your child, just make sure you inform the audiologist. And more often than not, they’re willing to tweak the test to get it processed for your kid.
Matt: Yeah, I thought that that was really helpful, because I mean, we were able to get the results that we needed to gauge where her hearing was at, because she was able to respond from the songs that she liked to hear.
Lia: And they also do a physical examination of your child’s ear. So they looked inside both ears, they did like a pressure test and they also just checked for any physical obstructions like too much earwax, this or that. They tried to basically just rule out any other reason why your child might not be responding to their name, etc. So when we did that test, we got basically the clear that both of the girls had fine hearing, their hearing didn’t have any difficulty. So we knew when we took that to the autism evaluation, that the results from that would probably be more likely due to autism and not due to any sort of hearing impairment. So if you haven’t had that evaluation done for your child, I would just recommend that you do it just to get the clear and make sure because there is also a high correlation.
Matt: Yeah, I was gonna say the exact same thing. If you’re able to knock that out before you go out for a diagnosis, that’s helpful, because that’s one thing that you can eliminate, as opposed to having kind of something else up in the air like, well, are they autistic? Or is it a audio thing that they might not be able to hear? So it’s better just to kind of cross that out as a possibility right from the start.
Lia: What’s interesting now that we’re on this topic is I found a study that was done by Harvard. This was fairly recently I think this was like December of 2020. And it’s really cool because they found that they might be able to enhance early detection of autism through a newborn hearing test. The newborn hearing test for those of you out there listening, they do this for every newborn. So every time a baby is born, they just by default will do a hearing test just to make sure that the child is hearing properly and then flag if there’s any concerns so there can be proper follow-up. And what they found in the study is basically that when they were checking for newborn hearing tests, specifically of the children who were followed through this study, they found that 321 of the 140,000 that were tested were subsequently diagnosed with autism and that those 321 when they checked their evaluation, retrospectively, they basically found that they had had a lower than average hearing outcome in that newborn screening. So basically, they either didn’t pass or they’re lower on the scoring than the neurotypical baby.
Matt: And I think as soon as we read that story, study, we start to think back to our oldest, and I remember the nurses saying that they had to run the test a few times with her because — not that it wasn’t inconclusive, but it wasn’t registering where they needed to be, or something along those lines.
Lia: The analysis showed that kids who are diagnosed with autism had abnormal newborn hearing tests, but they found that their brains detected sounds with a delay.
Matt: Okay.
Lia: Yeah.
Matt: So that would kind of coincide with our oldest daughter because they ran the test multiple times, I believe.
Lia: Yes.
Matt: That’s what they told us when we were in the hospital.
Lia: So when we saw this study, it was kind of interesting, because we didn’t even think about that when our child was in the hospital. She was our first kid, we didn’t really know what was going on. And they were running multiple hearing tests on her and I believe it was because they said that she was kind of like borderline or just barely failing sometimes. And then they basically wanted to just continue to test just to make sure before they said that she didn’t have normal hearing. Right?
Matt: Right. Yeah, I can’t remember exactly what the words that they were using were. But I remember they had told us that they had done it multiple times, because it was kind of almost like, on the bubble, or that there was something that they wanted to double-check. And of course, that’s being new parents were like, yeah, sure. Go for it.
Lia: Yeah, at the time, we didn’t think anything of it, because autism was clearly not on the radar at the time. But retrospectively, like now that we think about it, it’s like, yeah, you know, that probably was related the fact that she was borderline about to fail these tests, and they just kept having to run them. At the end of the day though she did pass them and then when they did their audiology tests they did pass them but there did seem to be some sort of like bump in the road there initially.
Matt: So if you have any hearing concerns, we recommend to talk to an audiologist just to kind of get some questions answered to kind of move from there. But also, that doesn’t mean that that is your only course of action. We also recommend trying to make any and all accommodations that you possibly can think of just to help the kids along the way.
Lia: And depending on the age of your child, there’s a few different options for any sort of hearing accommodations. One very common one is noise-cancelling headsets (paid link). Noise cancelling headsets have an option so that you can reduce the amount of sound that’s coming in. So you can turn that on and that’s like an electronic component. That’s really good for I think like teens and older kids who can use electronics. For very young kids, or just ones that don’t want to use noise-cancelling headsets, you can just use ear muffs (paid link). I think those are also called like ear defenders. But those are basically just like a headset that’s not electronic.
Matt: Just blocking out the noise?
Lia: Yeah, they’re just like headsets that muffle sound, so you can use that and our kids use those a lot. A third option that is lesser known, there’s these ear bud type of things that are from the company called flare, I believe they’re called like, Flare Calmer earbuds (paid link). I have a couple of these myself. And these are basically they’re like earbuds that go inside of your ear. However, they’re open and hollowed out. And what they do is they reduce the reverberation of sound in your ear. So you can still hear sounds but they tend to kind of mute the higher pitch harsher sounds like the nails on the chalkboard sounds. So you can still hear, they’re not noise canceling, they’re not noise muffling, but they kind of eliminate some of those like higher pitch squeaking, I would say like the more painful sounds.
Matt: And I imagine for those that’s probably older group as well.
Lia: So typically, it’s the older group, but they just came out with their kids line. So now they do have some available for kids too. So those are just a couple of options. Just keep in mind what your kids’ sensory needs are if they’re the type of kid that can’t handle something in their ear, or if they can’t handle something over their ear. I have also seen these animal headbands, headsets (paid link) that go over the head on Amazon. We tried it with our kid it was a sensory nightmare, but I’ve seen with other kids that it’s actually a sensory savior. So this one is kind of like a workout headband that you put like a sweatband over your head. But the earpieces go over your ear, and it’s just like a fur headband. So it’s very soft and there’s nothing that goes in in the air. So just depending on your kid, I will put some links in the show notes to all of these so that you guys can access them from there.
Matt: Otherwise, I think that pretty much wraps up the sense of hearing.
Lia: Yep, I’ll see you all later. We will be talking about fun new interesting topics so stick around.
Outro:
Lia: To review, we discussed how use of noise reduction earmuffs can help those hypersensitive to sound, how effectively using praise in your child’s preferred activities can encourage them to respond to their name, and why seeing an audiologist may benefit your child if you suspect hearing challenges. Tune into our next episode where we discuss aphantasia or the inability to form mental images and its link to autism. We answer questions such as, what is aphantasia? How is it related to autism? And what senses may be impacted? This is Embracing Autism.
–
Resources:
Hearing Autism — Early Detection Newborn Screening
Noise-cancelling headphones (paid link)
Noise-reduction earmuffs (paid link)
Flare Calmer Earbuds (paid link)
CozyPhones over the ear headband headphones (paid link)
Disclaimer: As an amazon affiliate, AutismWish will receive a fee for any items purchased through our links.
Show Notes for Embracing Autism Podcast — Ep. 206
Introduction:
Lia: In this episode, we tackle our final sense the sense of hearing and how autistic children may react differently to sound than their neurotypical peers. We discussed the importance of completing a hearing evaluation, as well as some adjustments or accommodations you can make to help your child cope.
Lia: Welcome to Embracing Autism, a podcast for parents of autistic children seeking advice and support while spreading awareness and acceptance of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Lia: I’m Lia!
Matt: And I’m Matt!
Lia: And each week, we’ll discuss our journey with autism and talk about how to embrace your child’s individuality while providing guidance, tips, resources and sharing our personal stories. This is —
Lia & Matt: Embracing Autism!
Discussion:
Lia: Hi, all so today we’re going to be talking about our final sense, the sense of hearing, this is the final, I guess, official sense, because I’m not sure the other ones count as senses.
Matt: Yeah, we’ll stop at five and not do the sixth sense.
Lia: Let’s not do that one, that might be a little creepy. But yeah, our kids don’t have the ability to see ghosts. I don’t think… maybe I guess we’ll find out.
Matt: They are too young to notify us one way or the other.
Lia: Yeah, researchers are out on whether or not there’s a correlation with seeing ghosts and autism. So well, we’ll keep you guys posted if new studies come out.
Matt: Oh lord.
Lia: But we’re talking about the sense of hearing, which is kind of interesting for us, because we have the two kids that are similar in some areas when it comes to the sense of hearing, and then they’re very different in other areas.
Matt: Yeah, I would say that there is quite an overlap in their sensitivities. But not all the way I kind of think of like a Venn diagram, essentially, that we have the two kids and then their kind of overlapping areas of sensitivity. And then the drastic change that might affect one but wouldn’t necessarily affect the other. So I mean, a perfect example for this is they both are not huge fans of like the vacuum, for example, our oldest is absolutely terrified where the thought of the vacuum she’s off running, as were the youngest one, she’s nervous around the vacuum but doesn’t go off hiding. So I think that’s one of the examples where they both don’t like the concept of the vacuum or the loud noise that it creates. But then at the same time, there are other noises that one would tolerate better.
Lia: There’s like a combination of the over sensitivities and the under sensitivities. And again, this is why autism is such a spectrum because both of our girls are diagnosed but what exactly sets them off is not necessarily the same and they do overlap in some areas. So like one example that we had with our kid is the oldest one was absolutely terrified of any sort of toy that made any sort of noises. So for the longest time, we could not have any sort of electronic toys whatsoever. Or if they were electronic, we had to make sure it didn’t have batteries or was turned off because it would completely set her off. That like sudden jarring electronic noise or sound — she would freak out and have a total meltdown. Whereas our other kid actually seemed to be attracted to that. So like, for example, when you think of those books that you like, push buttons in and they make sounds, I’m not sure what those are called.
Matt: Audio sound effect book?
Lia: A sound effect book? I don’t know, people are gonna be laughing at us. Basically, with those books, one of my kids, the youngest one, she would love it. She would almost stim on it, where she’d be pushing the same sound over and over and over and over and kind of like enjoying and laughing.
Matt: And the oldest would basically be crying and yelling, begging her sister to stop it.
Lia: Yeah the other one would be crying and like hiding and like trying to get it to stop. So it can be problematic if you have multiple children who are autistic, because they can kind of set each other off when one needs an input that the other person is averse to. And that’s like a unique challenge that we’ve run into.
Matt: And then on the flip side of that, the youngest one will be singing in the car, and her older sister does not want her singing under any circumstances. So she’ll be kind of telling her to stop singing. So it kind of goes both ways, essentially, of how it kind of interacts with sound.
Lia: I mean, and then it goes the other way, too. It’s like it’s almost like they tag team with each other on setting each other off. Because then the oldest one, the older one has gotten in the habit of wanting to like verbally stim a lot where she’s like screaming are shrieking really loudly, just like for fun. Like she laughs afterwards. She thinks it’s like a good sense…
Matt: A game.
Lia: Yeah, it’s like auditory input for her. Like she likes the sound of it. And the youngest one is very sound-sensitive to that sort of pitch. So she honestly has to have these noise reduction ear muffs on all the time, whenever we’re on car rides, because that’s when the oldest one likes to scream more often. It totally triggers the youngest ones like she’ll start crying. She starts just freaking out and kind of getting emotional. So it’s kind of interesting to see how they’re very opposite in certain areas, but yet they’re both scared of like, a dog barking loudly.
Matt: Yeah, so I would definitely recommend as far as like having some type of like ear muffs. I mean, I feel like that is absolutely crucial because sometimes we’ll be somewhere — in the car, for example — and our oldest is being loud. We’ll see like our youngest kind of covering her ears just trying to block out the sound. So yeah, we definitely found that we need multiple sets of ear muffs kind of scattered throughout the house, car, everywhere just if we need to kind of pull out a pair to kind of put on her just to help a little bit that makes all the difference in the world.
Lia: Yeah, we’ve kind of learned that you can never really have too many noise-cancelling headsets like, honestly, or noise reduction. Honestly, we have like three pairs and we feel like that’s not enough. And we’re like in the market to get more because we have some in the car, we need some of that house.
Matt: We have some in the bedroom.
Lia: Yeah, we obviously need some in the bedroom, because sometimes the older one will scream during their nap time and trigger the other one.
Matt: Right, so we have been trying to find ways to allow the oldest one still to get the sensation that she needs, but then not completely disturb or disrupt the younger one. So I think of the one helpful thing that we had tried, and it kind of works sometimes is the cup that she’s able to kind of scream into the cup.
Lia: Yeah.
Matt: So that kind of allows her to kind of get the sound that she wants, because she still has the vibration and the impact of the sound. But then it’s also not disturbing her little sister.
Lia: Yeah.
Matt: But then that’s kind of a hit or miss if she decides to do that.
Lia: Yeah, so that was kind of like a workaround that we did is like if you have a kid who’s a screamer, one of the things that we came up with is getting like one of those red solo cups, for example, the bigger ones and just hand it to her whenever she feels the need to scream, and then we tell her to put it over her mouth and scream into the cup, and she can scream pretty loudly in that and it muffles the sound. So she still has the ability to do that and she just won’t trigger her sister as much. It does also give a little bit of like a vibration feedback because the cup is up against your mouth in your face. So if you’re yelling into it, you also do get a little bit of that like vibration sensory on your face, too.
Matt: Right? So I didn’t think that she actually liked it when we showed her that it’s just if she’s in the mood is there like a cup that she has around her? Otherwise, you have to go to track one down or try and make sure the other one has headset on.
Lia: Yeah, absolutely. Interesting things about hearing in autism is that they can have difficulty with hearing and a lot of times they are over-sensitivities or under-sensitivities. So one of the challenging areas in that is that sometimes children have difficulty blocking out other sounds. So if they’re over sensitive to sound, it’s kind of like if there’s a dog barking, if there’s a bird going off, sometimes it can also affect their ability to concentrate or pay attention to what you’re saying, because they’re too hyper-focused on that sound like that sound becomes a very distracting sound to them. Whereas neurotypical people can just learn to tune that out.
Matt: I mean, maybe that’s one of the cases because I’m thinking of like, when we’re taking our girls to the car, and I’m talking to our oldest, and she is talking to me about all — I’m saying one thing to her — and she’s telling me that she’s like, listening to the birds, essentially, that are making noise. And I’m like, well, I’m much closer to you trying to have like a conversation about like, oh, what colors do you see like in the trees, and she’s telling me like she’s hearing the birds. So it’s like completely ignoring what I’m saying. But finding another sound to kind of catch on to.
Lia: Yeah, I’ve noticed that when we’re putting the kids into the car, a lot of times, she’ll have this like zoned-out look on her face. And when I pay attention, I kind of start looking around, I’m like, is she looking at something? It doesn’t seem like she’s looking at anything, she’s just kind of spacing out. And then I realize it’s because she is trying to listen to the birds and the trees outside.
Matt: Right.
Lia: So like, that’s actually kind of a good point there is that sometimes we might think that they’re not paying attention, but it’s that they’re just hyper-focused on something else right there and it can be auditory input.
Matt: Right, and I mean, she would mentioned leaves or trees or dancing or something when she’s paying attention to the wind. So just interesting that even though you’re trying to probably engage in a conversation with them, or say their name, and they’re not giving you anything back, it might not be that they’re choosing to ignore you, but something else has fixated their attention, and that they’re zoning in on that with their audio.
Lia: And there’s like a bunch of different components to hearing when it comes to like the auditory system and autism. A few things that come to mind when it comes to autism are things like auditory cluttering. It can be kind of like anxiety-inducing to some autistic individuals, because of that difficulty with filtering and processing sounds like we just mentioned. So that means that for some autistic individuals, that can actually be a painful experience. I don’t have any particular studies on that. But just based off of the studies, we’ve heard from the other senses, I would imagine that it would also probably show that pain experience in the brain like it did with the other senses. That would be my assumption.
Matt: I was going to say — I mean, since it’s so prevalent, and all the others it’d be weird if it was the outlier.
Lia: I would be willing to bet that there’s research out there that probably verifies that but don’t take my word for it. Do a Google, Google Scholar search, not Google. But then there’s also the over-sensitivity to sound so they can have really painful reactions to alarms, things like bursting balloons. Oh my gosh, our older one really had a hard time with that one.
Matt: But then the youngest one loves it and then tries —
Lia: Oh my gosh.
Matt: — and sits on the balloon. So again, here we go again, with sending the other one into a meltdown of sorts.
Lia: Exactly. Like our oldest one hates popping balloons, like she gets so scared of it, but the youngest one absolutely loves it and will intentionally try to pop balloons.
Matt: Because she’s small, so she’ll use it as like her own bouncy ball and then bounce and then of course it’ll pop.
Lia: Yeah, exactly. And then things like banging doors and dogs barking, those were the first things we noticed with our oldest one was she was as young as like, what, three, four months old?
Matt: Yeah, she was only four months old and there was a dog that was barking next door to wherever we were and I remember she was absolutely terrified of the dog. And I mean, that’s understandable. Because I mean, it was it was a large dog kind of barking kind of close to her. And I mean, think that was her first time that she’s ever had any type of exposure to a dog. But we still see that even today, like, we went to the park today and there were two small little dogs that were kind of walking around just going on a walk. And she wanted nothing to do with the dogs. But then the youngest one wanted to run over and pet the dogs. So I mean, even that, that’s three years later, and she still has that disconnect from any type of dog.
Lia: Yeah, exactly. And then there’s like the under-sensitivity side, our youngest one, she, for example, I think, for the most part tends to be under-sensitive to sound because she has always even to this day had a really slow response to her name and getting her attention. We’ve always considered whether or not she had hearing problems or anything like that, until we eventually got her tested. But it’s kind of different for each autistic person in the sense that there’s people like our older child who’s super hypersensitive, and will react really quickly. And then there’s others that need more auditory input to get a reaction. So these are the types of people who would probably prefer to listen to music really, really loud. So I know some people that like when they’re listening to music in their earbuds, you can hear the music really loudly from the outside, and you can make out the lyrics, everything and all of that. And it’s because they need a higher volume to get the same auditory input that a neurotypical person would probably be able to get at like a normal lower volume setting.
Matt: Right. I was gonna say, I mean, as far as getting the attention of our youngest one, I think that that can still be a struggle. I mean, at least it’s still struggle for us. I guess, what would you say is the best approach that you have with getting our youngest one attention? I think for, for me, I think us trying to turn it into kind of a bit of a game kind of gets a better reaction than just us repeatedly calling her name if she’s kind of zoning out or listening to something else. So I think for us, if we turn it into like a song where we kind of tell her to like turn around or something, so we’ll kind of incorporate her name into the song and then suddenly, it kind of pulls her back a little bit where she hears something that she likes, because it’s kind of a song that she loves music. So when she hears the song, she’s pulled back, and then she hears her name and then she realizes that we’re trying to call her.
Lia: Well, the thing that I’ve learned through occupational therapists that kind of go along with that is that you tend to need to use things that are like high-reward, and whatever that thing is, depends on your specific child. So like for our oldest child, initially, she also didn’t respond to her name. For her, the high reward was giving her a ton of praise. We would kind of get in her face a little bit when we call her name so that she would know that, oh, when we’re calling your name, we’re trying to get your attention. And then we would just praise her like, oh, yeah, good job, that sort of thing. And she was very responsive to that, she loves having praise.
Matt: And it was also like, tickling her so she would be like laughing. So she would get the idea that, oh, when I respond, when they call my name, I get tickles. And she’s happy with the end result of actually responding to her name.
Lia: Right. But that didn’t work very well, for the younger one. The younger one, the reward system for her is different because she is more of a gross motor kid and so for her, the reward system that we had to use was more motion-driven or activity-driven or things like that. So it’s been harder with her, it’s still kind of like a struggle to get her to respond to her name most of the time, but we’ve made some improvement in that area by switching it to that sort of motion, gross-motor type of incentivizing.
Matt: Right, kind of the red light green light of sorts to kind of get her to redirect her body’s motion. And then she likes essentially kind of responding back.
Lia: Exactly. And then when the sense of hearing, it’s not just limited specifically to hearing the sounds, it’s also understanding the sounds you’re processing. So with autism, sometimes there can be difficulties in processing and understanding sounds, I believe, that’s called auditory agnosia. That basically means that for example, if they hear a sound, they need to then be taught the association with that sound. So like, let’s say that they’re in school, and they hear the bell ring, they need to then be taught that when the bell rings, that means that’s the time that you get up and go to your next class. It’s not necessarily intuitive. So there’s kind of like an auditory process like disconnect there between hearing the sound and then processing the meaning behind the sound. I thought that was interesting.
Matt: I just thinking. I mean, the example that you gave me that makes perfect sense. I think about like our elementary schools, sometimes the bell would mean something for us and sometimes it was a bell for other kids to come inside, which had no bearing on anything that we were doing. So it was like certain times of the day, the same exact bell could mean totally different things depending on what time of day it is. So unless you’re actually taught to incorporate, which I mean, most kids that kind of follow the flow of everything, but unless you’re actually taught what that individual bell means, at specific times, you would be completely clueless as to what it’s actually meant to be.
Lia: Exactly. And that can be difficult just for any kid. So just imagine how difficult it must be for somebody who has a processing disorder on top of that when it comes to understanding that information. So usually, you just got to give people a little bit more time, give them more examples, give them maybe visual stories or something like that to help them process what that means. And I think usually repetition helps with that too, kind of like a fire drill where you just practice before you do the actual thing. So maybe doing some sort of like drills where you practice, when you hear this sound, it means this. You could always turn that into a game to I would think. Another thing that falls in line with the auditory system. And autism is called meaning deafness. It’s kind of related to the auditory agnosia. But this is like auditory verbal agnosia. So the other one is just being able to process and understand sounds, that’s the auditory agnosia. But auditory verbal agnosia is going beyond that, and understanding what the language itself means. So in autism, that can be difficult as well. So that’s kind of correlated with like the speech, the receptive, expressive speech stuff in the sense that you have to be able to use like, short, direct sentences, so that they can process the meaning behind it easier than if you gave them a complex sentence. So that’s, again, part of that sort of processing where your ear is bringing the information in but there’s some point where there’s kind of a disconnect with the hearing part of the brain. So you have to kind of give them a little more time, give them a little less information, more bite-sized pieces, so that they can kind of get that to process a little more smoothly.
Matt: So in a way that would be kind of related to what we talked about in the speech episode, where we had very short, brief sentences that we would practice with our daughters to say when they were trying to make a request. So we would teach them to say “I want chips”, for example, instead of having a more complex sentence of “oh, can I please have a bag of chips, I’m really hungry, blah, blah, blah”.
Lia: That’s a long sentence for a 2-year-old.
Matt: But yeah I mean she’s polite, because she says, please. So I would imagine it’s kind of similar with that but instead of being a speech component, it’s more the hearing components so kind of on the flip side, in a way?
Lia: Yeah, exactly. So it’s basically like, the reason you did that under the speech area was because of a receptive processing issue. But the reason you’re doing it in the hearing areas, more of an auditory processing issue. So it’s kind of like a similar means to a different end.
Matt: So it’s like the opposite side of the coin.
Lia: Kind of — Yeah, of a five-sided coin?
Matt: Sure, a die — let’s say a five-sided die.
Lia: That’d be a weird die. Yes. But anyway, back on track. So that was really interesting. And then the other thing that I learned about is something called tonal agnosia, which is like tonal deafness. And that basically means that some autistic individuals struggle with the ability to pick up tone. And this is also part of hearing somebody’s inflection in their voice or emphasis in certain words. There’s actually I think, in the autism tests, that’s some of the questions that they asked.
Matt: So essentially, it’d be them potentially struggling to pick up sarcasm, if they’re talking to a peer. So if a peer was to say like, “No, I’m not hungry”, clearly, meaning that they’re very hungry, I wasn’t sure if that means that they might struggle with the inflection that it means the opposite.
Lia: Exactly. Or like things like hyperbole when there’s like an exaggeration in what you’re saying, or it could also be like, when you add an emphasis to a word to give it another meeting. Like if you say, “Hey, look over there”, and you say it kind of like ‘there’ like, secretly, and then the person might be like, what look where you’re like, over there, like, they might not get that, you know. So it’s kind of like the version of like, when you point to something with your eyes, because you want to be discreet, and the other person picks up on it. This is kind of like the audio version of that, where it’s like you’re speaking something in a certain tone, or a certain emphasis or certain way and that is giving a second layer of meaning to what you’re saying. So if you’re not able to understand that second layer, meaning you’re more likely to take it very literally.
Matt: Okay, that makes sense.
Lia: So that’s called tonal deafness, because it’s like, specifically related to like the tone and inflection in the person’s voice and how they’re emphasizing things. And I think it goes both ways. So I think it’s both a matter of not being able to pick it up when other people are doing it, but also not necessarily being able to do it yourself. So it’s very common and autistic individuals part of the diagnosis process is they’ll ask and see if the person has a monotone voice, for example. And that tends to be common to where people say that — monotonal is kind of like robotic. So sometimes there is no inflection. You don’t speak with like a natural rhythm. It might just be more I think of like NPR.
Matt: Oh, yeah, pretty much.
Lia: Yeah, I kind of like that monotone type of news anchor voice.
Matt: Which I guess makes sense. If the understanding behind the hidden meaning in the language is kind of something that you’re not understanding, then you wouldn’t engage in that because it would be kind of irrelevant.
Lia: And none of this is to say that autistic individuals experience all of these things or even any of these things. These are just a bunch of different examples of different experiences that some autistic individuals have reported. But again, every person is different. So they might not necessarily have any of these or they could have many of these or a mix. So because of these hearing impairments that are possible or these sensitivities, oftentimes it’s recommended for autistic individuals to go to an audiologist for hearing tests. For our children’s autism evaluations, they actually asked us if they had their hearing tested prior to the assessments. So we did actually get them both assessed. Cool tip there, if your kid has not gotten assessed yet, the local public school system, at least in the United States, does free audiology tests. So we were able to get both of our children tested for free through the public school system.
Matt: We did them — must have been before they were two I would imagine, right?
Lia: Yes. And they do have like a kid version of an audiology test. So if you’re just curious, I can describe it really quickly. I had my child and we went into like this soundproof booth, and I had her on my lap. And then what they have on the two corners of the walls is they have a toy, and a light and the toy, I think it was like, maybe like a clown with cymbals or something like that. It’s kind of creepy, but I let them know in advance that my children were likely autistic, and very sensitive to sudden noises and sudden movement. So they were very understanding of that and they turned that component off, because usually the toy is used as a reward, so that if your child looks in the correct direction of where the sound came from, the toy is there and the toy will like make noises to reward them. But for autistic kids that can have the opposite effect.
Matt: I mean, if it was a clown, even like you think like normal kids, it’s almost like a punishment.
Lia: Yeah, it honestly reminded me a little bit of like a Jack in the Box, like it kind of was — because it would pop up, it kind of is like a Jack in the Box. Yeah, so it was, I think it was creepy, but that’s what they’re using. So what they do is they put the kid in there, it’s kind of a really weird experience because it is completely soundproof. So when you go in there for a hot second, you kind of feel like you’re deaf, because you don’t hear anything at all. It’s very unnerving. But you hold your kid in your lap, and then they’ll do different pitches of sound. So they’ll do different types of sounds, they’ll do different volumes of sounds. And they’re basically just gauging to see whether your kid turns their gaze towards where their sound is coming from. And that’s how they know with toddlers and infants whether or not they’re able to hear the sound.
Matt: And I remember, I wasn’t actually in the booth with you but I was like helping them get her to respond one way or the other. So I remember, they were asking as far as like, is there anything that she’s interested in, so I was like giving them certain nursery rhymes to say certain lines to see if they would kind of get her to turn her head one way or the other to show that she’s actually able to hear the song because I mean, at that age, I mean, she was so young, her language ability was almost nonexistent.
Lia: Since many kids on the spectrum have that whole receptive, expressive issue, that was one of the things that kind of fell in place with audiology exam too is that they will use phrases or questions that the child needs to respond to. But if you have a child who like ours at the time was very non-responsive, we had to get creative and we talked to the audiologist and kind of fed her things that we knew our child would react to, because it was a special interest of hers. So if you have a good audiologist, you can talk to them and let them know like, hey, they don’t understand questions, but they will fill in the blanks to like this story, if you read a line from it, or they’ll fill in the blanks to this song. That way, you know that they heard the sound, because they’re responding to it by filling in the blank. So if there’s anything like that, that works for your child, just make sure you inform the audiologist. And more often than not, they’re willing to tweak the test to get it processed for your kid.
Matt: Yeah, I thought that that was really helpful, because I mean, we were able to get the results that we needed to gauge where her hearing was at, because she was able to respond from the songs that she liked to hear.
Lia: And they also do a physical examination of your child’s ear. So they looked inside both ears, they did like a pressure test and they also just checked for any physical obstructions like too much earwax, this or that. They tried to basically just rule out any other reason why your child might not be responding to their name, etc. So when we did that test, we got basically the clear that both of the girls had fine hearing, their hearing didn’t have any difficulty. So we knew when we took that to the autism evaluation, that the results from that would probably be more likely due to autism and not due to any sort of hearing impairment. So if you haven’t had that evaluation done for your child, I would just recommend that you do it just to get the clear and make sure because there is also a high correlation.
Matt: Yeah, I was gonna say the exact same thing. If you’re able to knock that out before you go out for a diagnosis, that’s helpful, because that’s one thing that you can eliminate, as opposed to having kind of something else up in the air like, well, are they autistic? Or is it a audio thing that they might not be able to hear? So it’s better just to kind of cross that out as a possibility right from the start.
Lia: What’s interesting now that we’re on this topic is I found a study that was done by Harvard. This was fairly recently I think this was like December of 2020. And it’s really cool because they found that they might be able to enhance early detection of autism through a newborn hearing test. The newborn hearing test for those of you out there listening, they do this for every newborn. So every time a baby is born, they just by default will do a hearing test just to make sure that the child is hearing properly and then flag if there’s any concerns so there can be proper follow-up. And what they found in the study is basically that when they were checking for newborn hearing tests, specifically of the children who were followed through this study, they found that 321 of the 140,000 that were tested were subsequently diagnosed with autism and that those 321 when they checked their evaluation, retrospectively, they basically found that they had had a lower than average hearing outcome in that newborn screening. So basically, they either didn’t pass or they’re lower on the scoring than the neurotypical baby.
Matt: And I think as soon as we read that story, study, we start to think back to our oldest, and I remember the nurses saying that they had to run the test a few times with her because — not that it wasn’t inconclusive, but it wasn’t registering where they needed to be, or something along those lines.
Lia: The analysis showed that kids who are diagnosed with autism had abnormal newborn hearing tests, but they found that their brains detected sounds with a delay.
Matt: Okay.
Lia: Yeah.
Matt: So that would kind of coincide with our oldest daughter because they ran the test multiple times, I believe.
Lia: Yes.
Matt: That’s what they told us when we were in the hospital.
Lia: So when we saw this study, it was kind of interesting, because we didn’t even think about that when our child was in the hospital. She was our first kid, we didn’t really know what was going on. And they were running multiple hearing tests on her and I believe it was because they said that she was kind of like borderline or just barely failing sometimes. And then they basically wanted to just continue to test just to make sure before they said that she didn’t have normal hearing. Right?
Matt: Right. Yeah, I can’t remember exactly what the words that they were using were. But I remember they had told us that they had done it multiple times, because it was kind of almost like, on the bubble, or that there was something that they wanted to double-check. And of course, that’s being new parents were like, yeah, sure. Go for it.
Lia: Yeah, at the time, we didn’t think anything of it, because autism was clearly not on the radar at the time. But retrospectively, like now that we think about it, it’s like, yeah, you know, that probably was related the fact that she was borderline about to fail these tests, and they just kept having to run them. At the end of the day though she did pass them and then when they did their audiology tests they did pass them but there did seem to be some sort of like bump in the road there initially.
Matt: So if you have any hearing concerns, we recommend to talk to an audiologist just to kind of get some questions answered to kind of move from there. But also, that doesn’t mean that that is your only course of action. We also recommend trying to make any and all accommodations that you possibly can think of just to help the kids along the way.
Lia: And depending on the age of your child, there’s a few different options for any sort of hearing accommodations. One very common one is noise-cancelling headsets (paid link). Noise cancelling headsets have an option so that you can reduce the amount of sound that’s coming in. So you can turn that on and that’s like an electronic component. That’s really good for I think like teens and older kids who can use electronics. For very young kids, or just ones that don’t want to use noise-cancelling headsets, you can just use ear muffs (paid link). I think those are also called like ear defenders. But those are basically just like a headset that’s not electronic.
Matt: Just blocking out the noise?
Lia: Yeah, they’re just like headsets that muffle sound, so you can use that and our kids use those a lot. A third option that is lesser known, there’s these ear bud type of things that are from the company called flare, I believe they’re called like, Flare Calmer earbuds (paid link). I have a couple of these myself. And these are basically they’re like earbuds that go inside of your ear. However, they’re open and hollowed out. And what they do is they reduce the reverberation of sound in your ear. So you can still hear sounds but they tend to kind of mute the higher pitch harsher sounds like the nails on the chalkboard sounds. So you can still hear, they’re not noise canceling, they’re not noise muffling, but they kind of eliminate some of those like higher pitch squeaking, I would say like the more painful sounds.
Matt: And I imagine for those that’s probably older group as well.
Lia: So typically, it’s the older group, but they just came out with their kids line. So now they do have some available for kids too. So those are just a couple of options. Just keep in mind what your kids’ sensory needs are if they’re the type of kid that can’t handle something in their ear, or if they can’t handle something over their ear. I have also seen these animal headbands, headsets (paid link) that go over the head on Amazon. We tried it with our kid it was a sensory nightmare, but I’ve seen with other kids that it’s actually a sensory savior. So this one is kind of like a workout headband that you put like a sweatband over your head. But the earpieces go over your ear, and it’s just like a fur headband. So it’s very soft and there’s nothing that goes in in the air. So just depending on your kid, I will put some links in the show notes to all of these so that you guys can access them from there.
Matt: Otherwise, I think that pretty much wraps up the sense of hearing.
Lia: Yep, I’ll see you all later. We will be talking about fun new interesting topics so stick around.
Outro:
Lia: To review, we discussed how use of noise reduction earmuffs can help those hypersensitive to sound, how effectively using praise in your child’s preferred activities can encourage them to respond to their name, and why seeing an audiologist may benefit your child if you suspect hearing challenges. Tune into our next episode where we discuss aphantasia or the inability to form mental images and its link to autism. We answer questions such as, what is aphantasia? How is it related to autism? And what senses may be impacted? This is Embracing Autism.
–
Resources:
Hearing Autism — Early Detection Newborn Screening
Noise-cancelling headphones (paid link)
Noise-reduction earmuffs (paid link)
Flare Calmer Earbuds (paid link)
CozyPhones over the ear headband headphones (paid link)
Disclaimer: As an amazon affiliate, AutismWish will receive a fee for any items purchased through our links.
