Now, I’m not opposed to grandmas (or grandpas) on principle. I am, however, allergic to ageism and stereotyping, especially as it relates to disabilities.
What got my hackles up was one particular headline in the Daily Pnut e-newsletter: “New gift for grandma.” In the so-called Loose Nuts section, they briefly reported on Apple’s new “Hearing Aid Feature” for the AirPods Pro 2 ear buds recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Who — the writer or the newsletter editor — penned the grandma quip is uncertain. They seem to have a small staff, fewer than five people. Here’s why the grandma gaffe struck me as egregious and wrong.
Granted, the older one gets, the more likely one is to experience hearing loss. But hearing loss does not discriminate merely on the basis of age. Data show that one in five people between the ages of 20 and 29 have obvious signs (audiometric notches) of noise-induced hearing loss, or NIHL. Go lower than that and the percentage doesn’t drop by too many points. The prevalence of NIHL among U.S. adolescents aged twelve to nineteen ranges between 12.8 percent and 17.5 percent, according to 2020 data from the CDC.
This is not even to mention the excessive noise levels for everyday events, like sixth-grade PE classes in an echo-chamber gymnasium, daily lunches, pep rallies, dances, bus rides (at times, depending on the driver), and sports events.
Confronted with reality, the assumptions about hearing loss get less and less funny, don’t you think?
I further posit that, in these new, fast times at a screen-crazy Ridgemont High, children are more plugged in than ever, which in turn subjects them to greater potential for unintended damage. Audio, whether delivered via headphones or on-screen video clips — and especially, in terms of NIHL, earbuds and AirPods — has become a regular facet of the learning environment. From daily lessons to testing environments, audio is the norm, from my experiences, especially for Special Education, or SPED, students. Some SPED students may require the presence of auditory lessons when mastery in reading or comprehension lags. This is not even to mention the excessive noise levels for everyday events, like sixth-grade PE classes in an echo-chamber gymnasium, daily lunches, pep rallies, dances, bus rides (at times, depending on the driver), and sports events in said gym, plus irregular happenings like whipping up the kids for fundraisers by DJ-style marketing people.
It has been my experience that, at first, a person may subconsciously compensate for lost hearing ability, attuning instead to body language, “reading” faces and even lips without fully realizing it.
Then there’s coming to grips, psychologically, with one’s own frailties.
For a time in my twenties and thirties, I was unaware of (or chose not to believe) the severity of my own hearing loss. Deep down, I guess I knew, but I wanted to push the deficit away. I’d spent many hours in sound booths as a youngster, raising this hand or that — or neither — and repeating rhyming words, with and without noise interference and at varying decibels. If I could hear them at all. There wasn’t any one negative adult experience that slapped me with the reality of my hearing challenges, or having exasperated someone close to me one too many times, that caused a sea change, but, rather, a raft of them. So, only my family’s prodding and the presence of Medicaid made it financially possible for me to receive the help I needed — in the form of obtrusive but functional over-the-ear hearing aids. The pricetag would have been two- to three-thousand dollars if I’d had to pay full price out-of-pocket. Hence, roadblock number one for the many people, worldwide, who could benefit from a hearing device: price.
Another complication adjacent to affordability relates to whether one’s health insurance (if one has it) pays for hearing aids at all. Well-intentioned legislation hasn’t been enough. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 set a benchmark for health insurance premiums that should not exceed eight percent of annual incomes in the U.S., but the fact that only five companies globally make the roaring-lion’s share of non-OTC hearing aids, some 99%, has not un-monopolized the industry. Only lower-priced OTC hearing aids, and even the pricier AirPods mentioned at the outset of this piece, are starting to do that by getting assistive devices to the hard of hearing (HOH) who may need but be unable to afford the medical devices.
Benchmarks for affordability are also being fine-tuned in developing nations. The WHO has set recommendations for hearing aid pricing; they quaintly “suggest” (sounds downright genial, doesn’t it?) that pricing not exceed three percent of the average income in these countries. Never mind that untreated hearing loss connects the dots of health maladies, linking to both depression and dementia.
Beyond income limitations, other obstacles to hearing aid use vary from device regulations to hearing-aid availability and — this is a biggie — stigma.
Working this full circle, we arrive back, Eliot-like, where we started: at the Only-Grandmas clickbait-y headline, a “new gift for grandma.” (To that end, I maintain that
Now, I’m not opposed to grandmas (or grandpas) on principle. I am, however, allergic to ageism and stereotyping, especially as it relates to disabilities.
What got my hackles up was one particular headline in the Daily Pnut e-newsletter: “New gift for grandma.” In the so-called Loose Nuts section, they briefly reported on Apple’s new “Hearing Aid Feature” for the AirPods Pro 2 ear buds recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Who—the writer or the newsletter editor—penned the grandma quip is uncertain. They seem to have a small staff, fewer than five people. Here’s why the grandma gaffe struck me as egregious and wrong.
Granted, the older one gets, the more likely she is to experience hearing loss. But hearing loss does not discriminate on the basis of age. Data show that one in five people between the ages of 20 and 29 have obvious signs (audiometric notches) of noise-induced hearing loss, or NIHL. Go lower than that and the percentage doesn’t drop by too many points. The prevalence of NIHL among U.S. adolescents aged twelve to nineteen ranges between 12.8% and 17.5%, according to 2020 data from the CDC.
Confronted with reality, the assumptions about hearing loss get less and less funny, don’t you think?
I further posit that, in these new, fast times at a screen-crazy Ridgemont High, children are more plugged in than ever, which in turn subjects them to greater potential for unintended damage. Audio, whether delivered via headphones or on-screen video clips—and especially, in terms of NIHL, earbuds and AirPods—has become a regular facet of the learning environment. From daily lessons to testing environments, audio is the norm, from my experiences, especially for Special Education, or SPED, students. Some SPED students may require the presence of auditory lessons when mastery in reading or comprehension lags. This is not even to mention the excessive noise levels for everyday events, like sixth-grade PE classes in an echo-chamber gymnasium (oy vey), daily lunches, pep rallies, dances, bus rides (at times, depending on the driver), and sports events in said gym, plus irregular happenings like whipping up the kids for fundraisers by DJ-style marketing people.
It has been my experience that, at first, a person may subconsciously compensate for lost hearing ability, attuning instead to body language, “reading” faces and even lips without fully realizing it.
Then there’s coming to grips, psychologically, with one’s own frailties.
For a time in my twenties and thirties, I was unaware of (or chose not to believe) the severity of my own hearing loss. Deep down, I guess I knew, but I wanted to push the deficit away. I’d spent many hours in sound booths as a youngster, raising this hand or that—or neither—and repeating rhyming words, with and without noise interference and at varying decibels. If I could hear them at all. There wasn’t any one negative adult experience that slapped me with the reality of my hearing challenges, or having exasperated someone close to me one too many times, that caused a sea change, but, rather, a raft of them. So, only my family’s prodding and the presence of Medicaid made it financially possible for me to receive the help I needed — in the form of obtrusive but functional over-the-ear hearing aids. The pricetag would have been two- to three-thousand dollars if I’d had to pay full price out-of-pocket. Hence, roadblock number one for the many people, worldwide, who could benefit from a hearing device: price.
Another complication adjacent to affordability relates to whether one’s health insurance (if one has it) pays for hearing aids at all. Well-intentioned legislation hasn’t been enough. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 set a benchmark for health insurance premiums that should not exceed eight percent of annual incomes in the U.S., but the fact that only five companies globally make the roaring-lion’s share of non-OTC hearing aids, some 99%, has not un-monopolized the industry. Only lower-priced OTC hearing aids, and even the pricier AirPods mentioned at the outset of this piece, are starting to do that by getting assistive devices to the hard of hearing (HOH) who may need but be unable to afford the medical devices.
Benchmarks for affordability are also being fine-tuned in developing nations. The WHO has set recommendations for hearing aid pricing; they quaintly “suggest” (sounds downright genial, doesn’t it?) that pricing not exceed three percent of the average income in these countries. Never mind that untreated hearing loss connects the dots of health maladies, linking to both depression and dementia.
Beyond income limitations, other obstacles to hearing aid use vary from device regulations to hearing-aid availability and—this is a biggie—stigma.
Working this full circle, we arrive back, Eliot-like, where we started: at the Only-Grandmas clickbait-y headline, a “new gift for grandma.” (To that end, I maintain that a funnier premise would have been something like, “hey bro, why do you spend so much time online — you peeping on Only-Grans.com?)
The WHO has set recommendations for hearing aid pricing; they quaintly “suggest” (sounds downright genial, doesn’t it?) that pricing not exceed three percent of the average income in these countries.
In any case, because only human beings “of a certain age” need hearing aids (hearing public, can you feel the seismic sarcasm waves radiating from me?), at least according to Daily Pnut, it’s easier to take pot shots at these folks sheltered far away somewhere, out of sight, out of mind. Possibly they’re shaking their fists angrily at clouds and kids on their lawns, as the stereotype goes. Destigmatizing hearing loss, or other disabilities for that matter, is hard work. And imagining oneself as being fertile ground for disability is gut-wrenching. For sure. And yet, the deaf and HOH communities have made their voices heard louder than ever before in the last 15 years. It cheers me greatly.
Perhaps “Children of a Lesser God” set a too-high bar, but deaf and HOH characters in movies and television are showing their range, and it’s frankly impressive. From dramatic film (“Coda”) to thriller/horror (“A Quiet Place”) to television, such as gritty German-language sci-fi series “Dark,” British powerhouse “Doctor Who,” light-hearted “Sue Thomas: F.B. Eye,” and Martin-squared comedy pairing “Only Murders in the Building” (with Steve Martin & Martin Short), deaf and HOH actors are stomping stigmas right and left. Literary characters have gotten in on the act, too. Children’s novels such as “El Deafo,” “Jack Signs,” and “Astrid the Astronaut” beckon young (or older) readers. And, wonder of wonders, Emmy-nominated Keivonn Woodard — a deaf child of color — interacting with his “Dad” tears me up time and again in a Subaru car commercial, of all places!
So, what am I harping on here, really? What harm is a hard-of-hearing joke, deaf-grandma potshot, or an “are you deaf” frustration visited on your friend or acquaintance? That old saw about words never doing harm exposes something rotten to the core.
To me, there’s too much good to be done and experienced, plus all the positive connections to be made in the world, to waste time making assumptions about ages or health concerns or disabilities for a less than 15-millisecond laugh — especially one lobbed offhandedly from the Pnut Gallery.
Finally, thank you for listening!
