How do I help my 13 yr old son, learn to accept wearing his hearing aids?

He has a problem with self esteem and peer pressure. He wants to be normal, but has a progressive hearing loss and needs to wear hearing aids in order to insure he is not missing out on important information in class.

It is very difficult, because the most discrete hearing aids are usually not fitted to children so young because their ear shape changes shape so quickly at that age. This usually means that the child has to endure wearing an unsightly aid(s) and will probably be ridiculed by his peers.

All you can do is impress upon him the importance of education, and remind him that not hearing a question properly and therefore giving a wrong answer can be just as embarrassing as wearing the aid.

It is also my personal belief that wearing a hearing aid keeps the speech recognition centers of the brain more active, which helps prolong speech intelligibility. Not wearing the aid makes the brain more 'lazy' at understanding speech which seems to compound the problem.

Another approach would be to consider letting him grow his hair to cover it up. I know he shouldn't have to but kids can be so cruel.

The most expensive approach is to buy him a Completely In the Canal aid which the other kids won't see. More than likely at that age the aid will need to be re-cased every year at a cost of a couple of hundred dollars.

Investigate how effective the aid(s) is too, because often a reason for not wearing it is that in a background noise of school the results are so poor the child has little or not reason to wear it. It all depends on the quality of the system he has.

I wish I had the "right" answer for you, but I don't. At his age, I never wanted to listen to my dad, and just wanted to fit it. All you can tell him is that hearing is a precious thing, that there are people out there who don't have the opportunity to hear music, voices, everyday sounds we take for granted. Please take advantage of this precious gift while can.