Children’s hearing tests in Braddon

When a child's hearing is worth checking

Children rarely report hearing difficulty, because they have nothing to compare it against. What you see instead is behaviour.

• Turning the television up, or sitting very close to it.
• "What?" more often than seems reasonable, or not answering when called from another room.
• Watching your face intently when you speak.
• Doing noticeably better one to one than in a group or a classroom.
• Speech that is late, unclear, or has gone backwards.
• Tiredness and irritability after school, which is what sustained listening effort looks like in a child.
• A teacher describing them as inattentive, in their own world, or not following instructions.

That last one deserves weight. Teachers see thirty children of the same age every day and have an unusually good sense of what is outside the normal range.

What the appointment is like

From five, children are tested much the same way as adults, with the presentation changed. Headphones go on and the task becomes a game: drop a block in the bucket, or press the button, every time you hear the beep, even a very quiet one.

Alongside that:

• Otoscopy, to look at the ear canal and eardrum.
• Tympanometry, which measures eardrum movement and detects fluid behind it. Brief, and it feels like a small pressure change.
• Speech testing, repeating words back, which tests understanding rather than just detection.

Nothing hurts and nothing goes deep into the ear. You stay in the room throughout.

Glue ear and why it matters more than it sounds

Otitis media with effusion, usually called glue ear, is fluid sitting behind the eardrum after a cold or an ear infection. It is very common in young children and often painless, which is precisely the problem: it can persist for months without anyone noticing.

While it is there, hearing is muffled, roughly as though the child has their fingers partly in their ears. If that happens repeatedly through the years when a child is learning the sound structure of language, it can set back speech and early literacy even after the ears clear.

Tympanometry picks it up in seconds, which is one of the better reasons to have a proper assessment rather than a school screening.

Auditory processing: normal hearing, real difficulty

Some children pass every hearing test and still cannot function in a classroom. Their ears work. The difficulty is in what the brain does with the signal afterwards.

The pattern usually looks like this:

• Fine one to one in a quiet room, lost as soon as there is background noise.
• Multi-step instructions fall apart: they get the first part and lose the rest.
• Frequent requests to repeat, or "huh?" as a reflex before processing catches up.
• Reading and spelling that lag, particularly sounding words out.
• Exhaustion at the end of a school day out of proportion to what was done.

This is very commonly read as inattention, daydreaming or a behaviour problem, and children carry that label for years. An auditory processing assessment uses a battery of listening tasks, such as understanding degraded speech, separating competing messages in each ear, and detecting small timing differences, to work out whether the difficulty is real and where it sits.

Where it is confirmed, a lot can be done, and most of it is practical rather than medical: seating position, a remote microphone system so the teacher's voice goes straight to the child, explicit instruction strategies, and targeted listening training. The report is written so the school can act on it.

Under five

If your child is younger than five, or has complex needs, testing requires paediatric equipment and techniques that Candid Hearing is not the right setting for. Ring anyway. Pooja will tell you honestly that this is not the place and point you to who can help, which is a faster answer than a wasted appointment.