There was a time—not so long ago—when people memorized phone numbers, speeches, family histories. Children would recite multiplication tables, chant spelling rules, and read aloud until they could hear the rhythm of language in their bones.

We don’t do that anymore.

Modern life has replaced memory with Google, skill with shortcuts, and practice with apps. But human learning isn’t meant to be downloaded. It’s meant to be lived, repeated, performed, engraved.

And somewhere in this age of instant access, we’ve forgotten how to learn.

It’s a cultural shift. Children used to memorize long poems, sing entire songs without looking up lyrics, and repeat math facts daily at school. My children trained at a Taekwondo dojo where they were taught to use abacuses to learn math facts—eventually transitioning to mental math. I watched one boy sit calmly and add numbers mentally for almost five minutes, never writing a thing down, barely changing expression. And he got the answer right.

These students—many of whom score in the top 10% in math statewide—aren’t just memorizing steps. They’re building mental stamina. And after a year in that dojo, my own children’s math skills skyrocketed. They look for chances to use multiplication and division now. They don’t avoid math—they enjoy it. Because they’re fluent.

They didn’t just learn the facts. They drilled them until the facts became part of how they see the world.

We have to start at the beginning—because that’s when everything is still soft.

The brain at birth is malleable. Responsive. Alive with possibility. Every sound, every pattern, every glance, every gesture is building something. The wiring for language. The foundations of memory. The scaffolding for thought.

And if those inputs don’t come—not clearly, not consistently, not fully—then the brain will do what it must: adapt.

That’s why the story of Genie still matters…

You see, Genie wasn’t born broken. But from the time she was a toddler, she was confined, isolated, and deprived of language during the most critical years of her life. When she was rescued at thirteen, she had no language—no grammar, no sentences, no understanding of structure. She could learn a few words, could name objects, could respond. But she could never retain language fluently, never build or maintain syntax. Despite her intelligence and the dedication of dozens of professionals, the opportunity to fully develop language had passed.

One of the most painful things I see—as an audiologist, interpreter, and someone who grew up signing—is when parents say, “We tried ASL, but it didn’t work.” Or, “We put them in a class with an interpreter, but they didn’t catch up.”

But that’s not a failure of the language. It’s a failure of implementation. And more often than not, it’s a failure of access.

ASL isn’t a hobby. It’s not like trying out gymnastics or learning to watercolor. It’s a full language system—one that takes years of consistent, immersive input to become fluent. And when it is taken seriously, it changes lives.

I know this personally. My very first exposure to ASL wasn’t through school—it was through the Deaf daughter of a neighbor. That little girl had significant disabilities, and her parents were told to institutionalize her. They were told she would never learn language. That she would never function.

But they didn’t listen.

What I’m advocating for is expanding the conversation around deafness to include sensory-based auditory barriers, especially in educational and workplace settings.

This isn’t about appropriating Deaf culture or identity. It’s about recognizing that hearing is not binary. Many people—particularly APD, ANSD, and autistic individuals—may “pass” a hearing test but still struggle profoundly to process, tolerate, or make use of sound in real-world environments. That lived experience deserves recognition, accommodation, and language access.

Using tools like ASL isn’t about claiming Deaf identity—it’s about reducing communication deprivation. Just as audiobooks and captions have expanded access without erasing their roots in disability culture, ASL can serve broader access needs without diminishing its cultural integrity. Respecting Deaf culture and using ASL as a tool for survival and inclusion are not mutually exclusive.

Poorly programmed LGHAs can deliver output levels above 130 dB (per Phonak), which is well into the danger zone for noise-induced hearing loss. In some cases, overamplification has led to long-term sound sensitivity, tinnitus, and even hearing damage—especially in children.

On the other end of the spectrum, under amplification or poor physical fitting can be just as harmful. Early in my career, I worked under a supervisor who fit a young child with a mild hearing loss and clear signs of sound hypersensitivity. Instead of supporting his access to meaningful sound, she fit him with hearing aids that had completely occluding earmolds—no venting at all—and programmed them with such low gain that virtually no useful sound got through.

The result? His ears were physically sealed off from the outside world, but not meaningfully supported. The combination of blocked canals and minimal amplification created an unnatural, echoey, and overly silent soundscape—essentially placing him in a sensory deprivation chamber.

He didn’t just lose access to high frequencies or soft speech—he lost access to the foundational sounds of language itself. His hypersensitivity to sound wasn’t addressed; it was amplified through isolation.

Hearing challenges are one of the most overlooked causes of academic struggles in both children and adults. When we think of hearing loss, we often picture someone with a visible hearing aid or a significant audiogram shift—but many students who struggle in school have invisible hearing difficulties that never get flagged as “hearing loss.”

Some children miss key sound information because of auditory processing disorder (APD), where the brain struggles to organize and interpret sounds correctly—especially in noisy environments. Others may have dyslexia, which is often tied to reduced access to phonological information and poor speech-in-noise processing. Some experience fluctuating or unilateral hearing loss that makes it hard to localize sound or follow group discussions. And many children with auditory sensitivities or sensory processing differences find sound overwhelming, inconsistent, or painful—leading to shutdowns or avoidance in learning settings.

In all of these cases, one of the biggest hidden challenges is spatial hearing—the ability to figure out where a sound is coming from, how far away it is, or who’s speaking in a group. When spatial hearing is weak, the world feels unpredictable. The child may seem inattentive, anxious, or overwhelmed—not because they’re not trying, but because they can’t anchor themselves in space through sound.

The good news? Spatial hearing can be nurtured through play.

The following activities are movement-based, curiosity-driven, and often involve vision-restricted listening to help sharpen attention and sound mapping. Many of them work just as well for teens or adults as they do for kids. Because they include movement and navigation, safety and supervision are essential—but so is creativity. Pull out your scooter pads, a helmet, a blindfold, and a sense of adventure. These aren’t just games—they’re tools for rewiring the way the brain interacts with sound.

Here are 12 of my favorite activities to build spatial listening skills—for kids, teens, and playful adults alike:

For adults, especially those who are neurodivergent or sensitive to sensory input, structured clinical tasks can feel artificial or overwhelming. But when you embed auditory training into real-life, personally meaningful environments, the brain becomes more willing to engage and adapt. Here are some ways adults can guide their own auditory development through intentional, real-world practice…

One of the biggest challenges with auditory processing disorder (APD) is that we’re still stuck treating it like a behavioral or educational issue—not a medical one.

The standardized tests we use to diagnose APD are entirely behavioral. A child is asked to repeat words in noise, track tones, or follow verbal instructions. These are functional, yes—but they rely heavily on attention, language, and task performance. So when a child struggles, it’s easy for people to assume the issue is attention, motivation, or learning—not how their brain is actually processing sound.

And to make matters worse, there is no gold standard for APD testing.

The batteries vary wildly from clinic to clinic, subtracting even more credibility from the diagnosis in the eyes of schools, insurance companies, and even other clinicians.

This blog post explains how dyslexia, auditory and visual processing disorders, hearing loss, and language delays often overlap—and why early, layered intervention is critical. It also introduces a growing referral network of professionals working together to ensure kids get the right support, without unnecessary testing or barriers to care.

When a child struggles to hear clearly, speak confidently, or read fluently, we often treat the symptoms separately—speech therapy for articulation, reading intervention for decoding, and hearing aids for audibility. But there’s a quiet gap running underneath all three: a gap in phonological access. For many children with auditory processing disorder (APD), auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD), peripheral hearing loss, or even normal hearing with dyslexia, the problem isn’t just hearing sounds—it’s recognizing, sequencing, and storing them accurately. That’s where cueing becomes transformative.

Cueing is a visual system that represents the individual phonemes of spoken language using a combination of handshapes and placements near the face, in sync with natural mouth movements. There are just eight handshapes for consonants and four placements for vowels, but when combined with lipreading, they give a child full access to every spoken sound in the language. It’s not about teaching a child to speak—it’s about giving them access to the structure of language itself. The smallest units. The ones with meaning.