From silence to ‘Mama’: The 26-year-old helping babies and children with hearing loss learn to listen

Most parents celebrate their baby’s first “Mama” or “Dada” but rarely consider how much goes into this speech milestone. For a child with hearing loss, those utterances may not be a given.

So when Tiffany Lim’s first assigned case, a four-year-old with hearing loss who had spent most of his childhood in a world of silence, called out to his mother and grandparents for the first time, it meant everything to her.

“Up until then, he was in his own bubble,” she recalled.

The 26-year-old is an auditory-verbal habilitationist (AVH) at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital’s (KKH) Audiology Service. She works in a niche field, helping children and babies with hearing loss develop listening and language skills after they are fitted with hearing devices.

The work is deeply family-centred, with parents coached to support listening and language development both during sessions and at home.

In Singapore, around one in 1,000 newborns has significant hearing loss, according to KKH.Auditory-verbal therapy is recommended to monitor the child’s hearing device use and their spoken language development, said Lim.

On average, the KKH Audiology Service attends to 2,500 to 3,000 patients with hearing loss each year.The service sees children from around six months up to 18 years old. Some are born with hearing loss; others lose their hearing later due to acquired infections or medical conditions.

FINDING HER CALLING

Lim, who has a degree in psychology with a focus on child development, always wanted to be in a helping profession. She found herself drawn to the interactive, hands-on aspect of working with children during an internship at an early intervention centre.