Group counseling
Whether a hearing-impaired child is in the educational mainstream or a self-contained classroom, group therapy can be a valuable adjustive aid toward habilitation. Its value probably greatest when it can be integrated along with aural rehabilitation that includes group amplification, auditory training, and speech reading. Among the psychological benefits to be gained are the following :
1. Recognizing and understanding that they are not alone as they experience their hearing loss.
2. Learning to discover their own unique ways to cope with their loss.
3. Sharing with each other methods those that had been useful and those that have not.
4. Depending on their age, learning how to adjust more effectively to special problems associated with adolescence, relationships with hearing peers, family relationships, and school studies.
5. Developing positive attitudes about themselves be learning how to maximize their potentials and minimize their liabilities.
Although it may not be possible to establish a set of guidelines that will determine the efficacy of having a particular child in group therapy, it would be more useful for the counseling audiologist to make a case-by-case decision, either independently or in consultation with other professionals. Most important is that the decision be based on what the child needs, the cooperation of the family, and the availability of resources. Furthermore, group therapy should not be viewed as a substitute for other management practices, and every effort must be made to provide those that will benefit the child most.
One final note should be added. Regardless of the group therapy counseling model used, every effort should be made by the counselor to establish a therapeutic process whereby the children learn to assist each other rather than become individually passive agents in a group. Although the counselor at times may lead, educate, reflect, clarify, and possibly even judge, the children themselves should be given the responsibility to work through with each other whatever problems are present and those that may arise.
Conclusion
Although children with hearing loss have many of the psychosocial concomitants associated with children having other communicative disorders and, in fact, may be afflicted with those disorders as well, many factors are unique to hearing impairment itself. We need to be cautious, however, not to generalize those elements to all hearing-impaired children nor neglect to recognize the possibility of phenomena atypical to these children.
Clinically, audiologists are familiar with the psychodymanic challenges these children present, but are also frustrated by the absence of solid experimental research to help them better understand the processes and to facilitate the delivery of their services. Audiologists are faced with no less a challenge when inter venting with the hearing-impaired adult.