Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 34

Colin is ten. He is in trouble at school because he doesn’t pay attention. He gets bored, starts to mess around, and gets sent to the principal’s office. Is he stupid? Bad? Does he have ADHD or ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) or OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) or any of the other Ds? Perhaps, but there’s another possibility. What if he just can’t hear? What if his teacher’s voice is just too soft and he gets bored with its faintness, and at home he misses half of what is being said to him? Many parents joke that their son seems deaf when told to clean up his room. And school nurses have long noted that boys get blocked ears more frequently than girls. But there may be more serious factors at play.

Psychologist Leonard Sax, in his book, Why Gender Matters, makes some amazing claims about boys’ hearing. He presents research to show that boys do not hear as well as girls, and argues that boys need teachers who speak louder. He cites Janel Caine, a postgraduate student in Florida, who studied the effects of music on premature babies. These babies lie in their incubators all day, and Caine felt that perhaps some gentle music might help their growth and development. And boy, was she was right! In her astonishing findings, girl babies receiving music ‘therapy’ were discharged from the hospital on average nine days sooner than those who didn’t have the music. It really perked them up! But here’s the thing: boy babies did not show any such benefit. They either didn’t hear the music, or it didn’t affect them.

It’s actually hard to know what tiny babies hear – we can’t just ask them, ‘Did you hear that?’ But lately, some methods have been discovered that can tell if the brain is receiving the message that goes into the ears. Dr Sax claims that, in studies of ‘acoustic brain response’, girl babies have an 80 percent greater brain response to sounds than baby boys do. And guess what frequency this is in? The frequency of speech.

The difference continues into adolescence and adulthood. This might explain that terrible syndrome – complained about by teenage girls worldwide – that Dad is always yelling at them, when Dad thinks he is using a gentle voice!

In a number of recent commentaries, however, Dr Sax has been accused of exaggerating or misrepresenting the research – making sweeping claims from fairly obscure studies. And it does stand to reason that if a huge gender hearing difference was the norm, audiologists would have told us about it earlier.

Nonetheless, there is no harm in being more hearing-aware around boys. And dads, if your daughters wince when you talk to them, maybe talk a little softer.

It’s also possible that the problem of boys in school is not so much to do with hearing as with understanding. Australian audiologists Jan Pollard and Dr Kathy Rowe found that about a quarter of children aged six have poor auditory processing (separating what they hear into meaningful words). And most of these children (70 percent) turn out to be boys. These children have trouble understanding a sentence if it has more than eight words in it! Because teachers often use much longer sentences when teaching, these kids are stuck trying to understand the first part while the teacher (or parent) is going full-steam ahead with the rest of the message. The researchers recommend that teachers use short sentences, and only go on speaking when they see that ‘lights-on’ effect in children’s eyes. And Dr Sax adds that perhaps boys should sit at the front of the class, not the back.