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Childhood Hearing Overview
The Hearing Foundation of Canada actively promotes lifelong hearing health development as a key component to optimal communication and fully engaged lives.
Hearing health begins with screening for hearing loss at birth, and THFC has committed to an active public education program on the need for universal newborn hearing screening programs in all Canadian provinces.
In the years following infancy, THFC provides parents with the tools to monitor and protect their child’s hearing. THFC publishes and distributes a “Baby’s Communication Calendar” to approximately 300,000 new parents each year across Canada.
For information on the importance of early detection click here.
As a charter member of the National Coalition on Noisy Toys, THFC also alerts parents to the potential harm caused by noisy toys. As part of this commitment, we have created brochures and distributed them across Canada. As technology has advanced, toys are able to produce louder sounds that can cause hearing damage in children. This is especially true if the toy is held close to the ear, as children often do. THFC hopes to increase the standards of acceptable decibel levels emitted by toys and increase awareness of this issue.
For more information about noisy toys click here.
As children move towards adolescence, developing health hearing habits is crucial to protecting their future hearing. Our innovative elementary school program, Sound Sense: Save Your Hearing for the Music! / Oui à l’ouie: ménagez vos oreilles pour la musique!, targets students in grades five and six through an in-class presentation with animated video that teaches pre-teens (and through them, their families and communities) about the dangers of loud listening. Sound Sense explains to students how to protect their hearing from noise-induced hearing loss, a permanent type of hearing loss which is 100% preventable.
For more information about Sound Sense program click here.
For our Sound Sense website click here.
Read about Noise Induced Hearing Loss in Children, published in Paediatrics & Child Health
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