This short YouTube segment (Day 26) by Mary Kostka gives practical advice on using noise-reduction devices for people with sound sensitivity. Key product mentions include "Flair" (a silicone funnel-style attenuator), "Loop" earplugs, and inexpensive noise-reduction headphones (recommendation: Harbor Freight options under $10 for kids). The speaker emphasizes gradual acclimation (brief initial wear, turn-taking, making a sound to show difference, celebrating small increases — e.g., up to 45 seconds for one child), trying adult-sized headphones for comfort, alternatives like headbands or custom audiologist-made devices, and encourages community feedback and use of a worksheet.
Questions this video answers
October 22, 2025.
Harbor Freight (notes: options available for under $10).
Up to 45 seconds.
Foreign aloha, sensory heroes. Welcome to day 26. Can you believe we're only four days away from day 30? I hope that this has been beneficial and you've just been learning a lot of things. So remember we talked about how much sound is a big trigger for kids and so there's, and for the parents, really honestly just equally as much. I see. So for adolescents and adults, there's a couple of products that work really well. The flair, they're not really earplugs. They're, they're more like a silicone funnel that changes the pitch of the sound and so it just dampens the sound a little bit so you can still hear everything. But it's not, it's not as, you know, it's not as hard on your nervous system. The loop earplugs work really well too. For kids, usually what works the best is just some noise reduction headphones. You can buy them at. The best place I've seen them is Harbor Freight because you can get them for under $10. And with kids, when they get mad, they'll break them, they stretch them. So I, I, I don't really necessarily encourage people to spend a lot of money on these things. Just if you, the, the ones that aren't super expensive are, are really just as good because they just need to dampen down the sound. And the other thing is your child may reject them because they're just too tight. So a lot of times I have found that the adult ones work better on the kids because they don't squeeze their head so much. Now some kids might like that, you know, firm pressure. There are some that kind of fold inside themselves so they're a little easier to keep with you. In your purse you have a big, so the best thing to do is just to just try. You might have to try different ones. The other thing is the kids almost never will tolerate them right off the bat. It's really just like wearing glasses or just getting used to anything. So what I will typically do is just put them on them for a second and then say be like, your turn, my turn. And then I'm usually making a sound like la la la la la la la. So they can hear that. Oh, it sounds a little different. So it takes some conditioning like that. And what I always tell my parents is notice, was it 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds? Oh, we got past a minute. So we can celebrate the little wins along the way. And I always, like I said, I always make some kind of sound. So they make the connection that, oh, it sounds different. And then eventually you always want to have them out where the kids can see them. Eventually they will initiate putting them on when there's a sound that they don't like. But it takes some time so you can't just be like, oh, it didn't work. You have to kind of work at it little by little by little. We just did this with a little guy who wouldn't wear them even for a second. And doing this method that I was just talking about. We got him up to 45 seconds and mom was just amazed because he wouldn't tolerate them at all. The other trick was I had him doing a preferred activity. So he, he liked puzzles. So that helped because he was really engaged in the activity as well. Sometimes you can do things like headbands. Sometimes they'll work especially for like girls. Sometimes they'll do like a, a little cloth headband that kind of goes over their ears and around. There's just a lot of different things you can try. But like I said, it takes some getting, getting used to. And I had, I actually saw one kiddo that came to us with a custom. It was almost like, looked like a hearing aid, but it had like a volume control on it. So I thought that was very interesting. It controlled how much sound could come in. So he must have got that made by an audiologist. Is the first and only time I've seen a product like that. But most of the kids that I work with wouldn't tolerate anything inside, inside their ears. So those are just some different, different considerations, different things to try. And like I said, it takes time to, to get them used to it. It's not like a. Just one and done like get them in, they're going to work and consider like, do they like them really tight? Do they like them loose? And I have some information just give you an idea about different places that you can, you know what to search for when you're looking for them on, on Amazon. You can get pretty much everything there as well. And yeah. So I hope you find that helpful and I'll see you in the next video. Don't forget your worksheet. Any question and engage in the community when you try these different things. Tell us how it's going and, and support each other as we are building a community of sensory heroes. Aloha.
