B-3 Family Coaching

Babies learn to talk by listening to the voices of family members and caregivers from the time they are born. Any degree of hearing loss has the potential to interrupt speech, language, and learning development.

Our Birth to Three program is vital to helping families meet the developmental needs of a child with hearing loss. Repeated exposure to audible and intelligible words – like singing, reading, rhymes, conversation, and storytelling – helps a child’s brain build the connections that will enable them to easily learn words and continue learning at a rate similar to their hearing friends in the future. 

Listen and Talk’s highly trained Birth to Three Providers meet weekly in the family’s home and coach families by sharing information; guiding, teaching and modeling ways to support a child’s development. Through supported practice, a family learns to help their child respond to and interpret sounds, building a foundation upon which spoken language and learning will grow. 

Approximately 50% of the families we serve speak a language other than English and 25% of the children have other challenges such as vision loss, motor delays and cognitive delays. In these cases our staff collaborates with other birth to three centers to ensure a families’ needs are met. 

The earlier we can begin LSL services to children the better the outcomes. The majority of the children turning 3 years old who have been with Listen and Talk since early infancy, enter their neighborhood schools learning _side by side with their hearing peers.

B-3 Mentorship and Support

Teaching listening and spoken language to a child who is deaf or hard of hearing is highly rewarding as it’s no easy task.

This is why Listen and Talk connects families with each other and with other adults who are deaf and hard of hearing themselves for mentorship and support. These meaningful connections may be initiated at anytime, and introductions are made either in person or by phone, email or video conferencing.