As every parent of a deaf child will know, an alarming barrage of choices face you when your child is first diagnosed with hearing loss, decisions which feel (and are) truly momentous, affecting—as they will—your child’s entire future. Nonetheless, how lucky we are to have had choices, with modern technology and different therapy approaches offering so much hope and so many different options to so many families. I am acutely aware that some families do not have the same choices, either because they live in a country where access to technology is prohibitively expensive (or nonexistent) or because their children are on a different path, which leads them in one prescribed direction. That is why, despite our daughter’s diagnosis, we still count ourselves very lucky.

In my capacity as a Parent Ambassador for Auditory Verbal UK (AVUK) and author of books for deaf children, I was asked to write an article for the March newsletter of the Cochlear Implanted Children’s Support Group (CICS). Some of you may have seen this article posted already on AVUK’s site or indeed in the CICS newsletter itself, but for those of you who haven’t, here is a copy of the article:

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“Who on earth diagnosed this child?” asked the specialist. My husband and I looked at each other and then back at the specialist, realising in that moment that we had some tough news coming our way….