Can toys affect your child's hearing? | Integrated Learning Therapy

We know that music concerts and other sources of loud sounds can lower auditory acuity in people both young and old. But have you considered that children’s toys might put them at risk for hearing loss?

Katie Dease, of the Mayo Clinic writes that some toys can produce levels of sound equal to 90 decibels, with is as loud as or louder than a lawn mower. Because children often play with toys at a close distance, holding them near their faces and ears, that volume can go up to as high as 120 decibels, which is as loud as an aircraft taking off. At these levels, hearing protection is actually needed.

Do a sound test before buying

As a parents or other gift giver, it would be wise to check the noise levels of a toy before buying. Test the volume by holding the toy close to your face or crouch down to test how noisy it is for a child who plays on the ground. If it sounds too loud to you, it’s too loud for the child.

Try to lower the sound level

Toys: Try placing clear tape over the speaker. This has been shown to lower the sound level and may be safer for children’s ears. Check if the sound volume can be reduced or switched off certain toys.

Music and headphones: If children and teens have a music player with earphones, parents should stand near their child when they are listening. If you can hear the music, it’s too loud.

Output-limiting headphones are an excellent gift option. In most cases, they automatically limit the output level to about 85 decibels, which is a safe volume for up to eight hours. Many devices, such as cellphones and tablets, have noise output-limiting settings that can be activated.

You also can invest in custom earbuds or noise-canceling headphones that help block background noise, allowing you to decrease the volume.

Instruments:

Some musical gifts are welcome but be aware of those that can do harm to hearing. For all musicians, but especially drummers, smart hearing health care is essential.

Older musicians may benefit from musician earplugs that limit sound without compromising musical integrity.

Drummers should try practicing with drum pads as much as possible. This will eliminate loud noiseswhile still offering a surface for rehearsing stick strokes.
Another approach is to limit practice to intervals. Try practicing, with ear protection, for 30 to 60 minutes, taking a break for the same amount of time to give your ears a rest, then going back to practice.

Above image supplied by Freepik.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.