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Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein. I’m an educational audiologist and a clinical audiologist, although I’m not working at the moment due to the Covid19 pandemic that’s going on, as I’m sure it is affecting you and your families, and all of us around the world. So, today I wanted to talk a little bit about ways for coping, and for helping ourselves and our children and our families get through this period of time, this period of uncertainty, and I got a couple of tips for you.

Now dealing with being home, we’ve all seen the memes going around but I think it’s really, really important to notice and acknowledge that our children and children in general are very attuned to the energy and the things that are being said around them. When children see fear and panic and overwhelm, then they take that in, they take it in and they take it on. It’s a big struggle for us as parents to also take care of everything and be in charge of everything, and try and keep the peace and keep everyone fed and even put in some learning, along with all of this missed school time for our kids. But a major, major priority has to be their hearts, has to be the peace in the home, and focusing on strengthening the bonds and the relationship. We really have to make this time not just a really beautiful amount of quantity of time, lots of time together, which is unusual for most families, but also making sure that some of that is also quality time of connection and of being together.

And I fully appreciate that missing school for many children also means not having access to the therapies, the school based therapies that they’re receiving, especially the ones that really require the equipment in the school, such as the play gems for physical therapy, and the equipment of occupational therapy. Of course, there is also the feeding therapist and speech therapy and a lot of things can be done remotely, there can be exercises that the therapist can send, but it’s going to take time to adjust to those different schedules and those different environments. And you know, just because things are being sent home, materials are being sent home or exercises, it doesn’t mean that you as a parent are trained or qualified or capable or want to be playing the role of their teacher and OT and PT and SLP or whatever other therapies they’re receiving, on top of all the responsibilities of parenting, which has now become an extra full time situation.

And this is not to mention the other things being disrupted such as surgeries being postponed and new babies who had a newborn hearing screening and might require follow up diagnostics. In the following weeks, a lot of those appointments will not be able to be kept. And I saw a very moving post of a family on Facebook who were writing that they recently received the diagnosis of their child’s hearing loss. And they had received a series of appointments coming up with the geneticist, with an ophthalmologist to check the eyes, and all these different appointments that now will be postpo...