Hearing loss can happen because a person was born with parts of the ear that didn ' t form correctly and don ' t work well. Other problems can happen later because of an injury or illness, including:

• middle ear fluid
• serious infections, such as meningitis
• head injury
• listening to very loud music, especially through headphones
• repeated exposure to loud sounds, such as machinery

Lots of kids have had ear infections, which also can cause hearing loss. Permanent hearing loss is rare from an ear infection, but you need to visit the doctor if you or your parents suspect you have one.

If a doctor thinks that a baby or child may have hearing loss, the doctor will recommend that the parents take him or her to an audiologist. An audiologist (say: awd-ee-ah-luh-jist) is someone who is specially trained to test and help with the problems related to hearing loss.

A pediatric audiologist tests a child ' s hearing by doing different types of tests. They even have hearing tests for babies! Maybe you ' ve had a hearing test, when you wore headphones and had to raise your left or right hand to show that you could hear in each ear.

If an audiologist finds that a child has hearing loss, he or she will recommend treatment and suggest the family work with a special team. This team can help figure out the best way for the kid to learn and communicate.

The kind of treatment depends on the type of hearing loss, how severe it is, and the child ' s other needs. Common treatments include medicine, operations, hearing aids, or assistive listening devices, which emphasize voices and help kids hear better in noisy settings. With treatment, most kids will be able to hear normally again.

Hearing aids are kind of like tiny amplifiers. They help someone hear sounds better and can even pick up the sounds so that what kids hear is more clear. Hearing aids deliver amplified sounds (via sound vibrations) from the eardrum and middle ear to the inner ear or cochlea. Hearing aid technology is available that can adjust the volume of sounds automatically.

For some kids who are not able to hear or understand words even with the help of hearing aids, there is a device called a cochlear implant (say: ko-klee-ur im-plant). This is a very tiny piece of electronic equipment that is put into the cochlea during an operation. It takes over the job of the damaged or destroyed hair cells in the cochlea by turning sounds into electrical signals that stimulate the hearing nerve directly.

A kid with hearing loss may attend a special school, special classes within a regular school, or may be part of a regular classroom. Depending on how severe their hearing loss is, some kids may work with audiologists or speech-language pathologists to help them develop their hearing and speaking skills. Some people with hearing loss may need to use special techniques like these to communicate:

• speechreading, which involves looking closely at a person ' s lips, facial expressions, and gestures to help figure out spoken words
• American Sign Language, or ASL, which is a language of hand movements that allows deaf people to communicate with one another without speaking

What about talking on the phone? Thanks to a telecommunication device, also called a TDD, a conversation can be typed out instead of spoken. The messages appear on a special screen or on a printout.

You might wonder how a hearing-impaired person could see a movie or watch TV. Closed-captioned TV shows and movies provide text at the bottom of the screen, so people with hearing loss can read along to follow the action.

So hearing-impaired kids can go to school, talk on the phone, and watch a movie. If that sounds a lot like a typical kid ' s life, you ' re right!