Family Empowerment: Supporting Language Development in Young Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

The value of identifying permanent hearing loss during the first few months of life and providing effective treatment to ameliorate or even eliminate the negative consequences has been recognized for many decades. Unfortunately, improvements in achieving this goal were very gradual until the early 1990s. At that time, the combination of technological advances in screening and diagnostic equipment and hearing technologies created a revolution in our ability to identify and provide intervention to children with permanent hearing loss during the first few months of life.