TPP 196: Understanding Auditory Processing Disorders with Dr. Donna Geffner
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
39 min
3 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 12 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is auditory processing disorder and how does it differ from a hearing loss?
They're seen as, quote, special ed kids and therefore have a stigma associated with it. And then it becomes very demoralizing to many of these youngsters. And we find kids with low self-esteem feeling badly, feeling like they're something, they're broken. Something is wrong with them. It's not unusual that I've seen a child turn to his mother and cry and say, I know something's wrong with me. Why do you have to always show me or why do I have to be different?
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reber, and this week I am talking with Dr. Donna Geffner, a speech-language pathologist and audiologist and renowned expert on audio processing disorder. Dr. Geffner is the author of five books and over 300 publications on auditory processing disorders, ADHD, and language disorders in children. In almost 200 episodes of the podcast, this is the first time I'm covering APD. And Dr. Geffner, as a former president of the American Speech Language Hearing Association, is a fountain of clinical information and research. In our conversation, we talk about what audio processing disorder is, how to recognize it in kids, why it's often misdiagnosed, as well as the best support and accommodation practices for school and at home.
This is a fascinating, jam-packed conversation with one of the world's top voices on APD. I hope you get a lot out of it. And now here is my conversation with Dr. Geffner. Hello, Donna. Welcome to the podcast.
Good. I'm glad to be here.
Well, I'm so pleased to bring you on the show. As I was mentioning before I hit record, I had heard you speak at Tika's conference last month, and I was just kind of blown away by what you shared. And this is a new topic for me and for the show. And so I'm really excited that you were able to come on and share with us today. So just maybe take a few minutes and tell us about the work that you do in the world and who you work with, and maybe why you're on a mission to do this work.
Thank you, Debbie, giving me the opportunity. I've spent a lot of years, first I was an academic. I was a university professor. I was the director of the Speech and Hearing Center and graduate program in speech language pathology and audiology. But I had an opportunity to work with a number of professionals, a psychiatrist, psychologists over the years and we've learned that many of the youngsters who wind up with the diagnosis of adhd have auditory processing disorders and i began to study this you know it's not a new disorder this goes back to the 1950s with uh kind of michael bust who studied auditory and perception auditory agnosia And we saw it a good deal in brain damaged individuals and individuals with aphasia.
But we find that children with no known brain dysfunction can have difficulty understanding what they hear. It's the inability to take in the auditory message, identify it, recognize it, discriminate it, listen under difficult listening conditions, and take it in in a timely manner. even with normal hearing. And what is so, I guess, very confusing to a parent is oftentimes the teacher will say, you know, your child is not listening, or I have to repeat things, or he asks what. And the parent takes the child to the audiologist or to the pediatrician, they test the child's hearing, and lo and behold, the child's hearing is normal. So they send them home and say, okay, well, his hearing is normal. I mean, we don't understand it.
Maybe it's ADHD. Well, it can be because we have a lot of comorbidities with this, but it also can be an auditory processing disorder. And I want people to understand, professionals, teachers, parents, that this exists. This is not a language disorder or can be associated with one, but it is an entity that stands alone as a disorder. And that is the inability to to take in the auditory information and derive clarity from it, be able to listen under difficult listening conditions.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is auditory processing disorder and how does it differ from a hearing loss?
0:00–13:10
2
How can parents recognize the early signs that a child might have APD?
13:10–22:54
3
What does a comprehensive APD assessment look like and when can it be started?
22:54–32:23
4
What classroom accommodations most effectively support kids with auditory processing disorder?
32:23–38:58
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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