Hope Lanter shares practical tips for talking with family members who have hearing loss during the holidays. Face them so they can lip-read, turn off background noise, rephrase questions instead of repeating louder, and be patient to keep everyone included.
So you're heading home for the holidays and someone in your family has hearing loss. But how do you communicate with them? How do you help them hear better and understand more of what's going on? First, make sure you're looking at them when you're talking to them. So it's easy to get in the hustle and bustle. Make sure that you're facing them. That gives them the best sound, you know, coming their direction. Also, they can look at your lips. So now the lip reading contextual cue there, they see that context as well, and it helps them to keep up and communicate better. Any noise that you can remove or reduce, also a very, very good thing for them. So now the TV's going, but nobody's really watching it. Everybody's just trying to talk. Good to turn that off or turn it down. Maybe somebody in the kitchen has the water running, and now you're trying to talk to that person. Maybe just pause for a moment until the water's turned off. But these are the things that seem small, but they're very intentional. And the person with hearing loss that you're talking to will thank you for taking the time and consideration to do these things for them. The other thing you wanna do is make sure that if they say, "Hey, can you repeat that?" or "Huh?" or "What'd you say?" Don't always say the exact same thing back to them. Don't say, "What time did you want to eat?" and then just keep getting louder with it and keep getting more frustrated. Maybe you say, "When did everyone want to sit down for dinner?" There's a lot of ways to rephrase the same thing but get the same point across. If you continue to just get louder and say the same thing that they're having difficulty hearing, you get frustrated, they get frustrated, and oftentimes they give up. But this can also make or break your holiday in terms of it being an easy and wonderful and great experience versus being something that feels like they're being left out.
