Wow, so glad to find this site! I'm Leigh and I'm a mom to 2 boys - James is almost 7 and Michael is 3.

My son James is the one with auditory processing disorder. We've been through a lot trying to figure out why he wasn't talking like he should. We finally heard from another parent to take him to an audiologist to have his hearing checked. He'd always passed his hearing tests in the pediatrician's office, but this parent said kids who have a history of ear infections might also have a hearing loss. That's where everything started to come together. We took our son in, and he did have a mild conductive hearing loss, but the audiologist suggested that we have a full auditory processing exam done on him. I didn't even know what that was, but she gave us a referral to an audiologist who could do the exam.

Our son has an IEP due to the speech delays (which have caused social delays so they say he is autistic-like). So we asked the school to pay for the audiology exam, and they refused. They said they would do the exam, but not until after he turned 7. Not sure why 5 months make a difference, but all the arguing wouldn't help. So we paid for a private exam, and he does have auditory processing issues. Pretty severely actually. He loses 90% of what he hears in ambient noise. So he's functionally deaf when it's noise. His kindergarten classroom was on the main playground last year, and now we understand why he suddenly developed attention problems that were not there before. Now we have to go back to the school and beg for the services he needs. Not looking forward to that!

Now we're looking for therapies to help develop our son's auditory system. The audiologist believes the APD may be due to the conductive hearing loss and excessive ear infections, and it's just that his auditory system is immature. I hope this is true because then there's a chance he can catch up. We did AIT with him, which seemed to help a lot, but he's still challenged with hearing in ambient sound. If anybody has other therapies they've tried, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks for reading!
Bonnie