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Turn Down the (MP3) Volume
Your child’s music earphones may be affecting her hearing. But there are ways to lessen your child’s chances of hearing damage
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Your teen is gliding through the house, “receiver” off the hook. She’s plugged into music cranked loud enough for you to hear. Should you be concerned?
According to Cape Town-based audiologist, Natalie Buttress, “Children up to the age of 14 have much smaller ear canals than adults, meaning the sound pressure level of MP3 players is higher for children than the same loudness would be for adults.” To make matters worse, children seem to tolerate sound easily and for long periods of time, and are able to listen to music at a higher level than adults would often find acceptable.
Your child’s overexposure to noise from their earphones “can cause temporary changes in hearing sensitivity, leading to permanent hearing damage and can later result in tinnitus,” says Dominique Bassil, an audiologist based in Johannesburg. Hearing damage can be devastating, particularly in a child, because the issue will impact development in other areas such as language and learning.
There are ways to lessen your child’s chances of hearing damage, without your needing to confiscate their MP3 player. Make sure the volume of their sound device is properly monitored, or that it has some kind of limiter. Buttress and Bassil say a child must always be able to hear normal conversation while listening to their MP3 player. This means that if you stand behind your child and talk at a normal level, he should be able to hear and understand you.
Volume Control
To give you an idea of how serious earphone noise can be, here are a few of the numbers: 80 decibels is an acceptable level for background noise, anything higher is potentially hazardous. Bassil explains that “80 decibels (alarm clock level) of background noise for eight hours is equivalent to 95 decibels (this is just louder than the sound of a lawnmower) for 15 minutes using an MP3 player. So, if a child listens to music at louder than 95 decibels for longer than 15 minutes, there may be long-term damage to hearing.” Rather than putting up the volume in order to compensate for the noise around us, Buttress suggests using, “high quality, noise-cancellation earphones – while not fully preventative, they do help.”
Buttress goes on to say that research has shown “an increase in identified hearing loss in the teen population as a result of excessive sound exposure”. Bassil has seen an influx of teens showing the beginnings of a noise-induced hearing loss. Since, as Buttress says, “nerve damage to ears is irreversible”, it’s time to sit up and take notice. Other things that make us city-dwellers more vulnerable to hearing damage are construction sites, blaring car radios, gym classes and nightclubs.
Most people only head to an ear specialist when the damage is done, but audiologists recommend a once-off hearing test for those at risk and if damage is detected then this will be monitored annually. Audiologists will be able to catch the slightest change in hearing, “and put protection in place, or treat the loss earlier, which means that less damage can take place over time”, says Buttress.
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