Our Mission

 

Children’s Hearing & Speech Centre of BC (CHSC) established in 1963, is a family-focused clinical and educational centre that provides listening and spoken language therapy to children with hearing loss, giving them the skills and confidence they need to achieve their fullest potential!

At Children's Hearing & Speech Centre, we understand the many ways that words connect your child's heart to yours. Living with a hearing loss is complicated for anybody, especially when you're just starting out. Our team of teachers and specialists warmly supports your whole family in developing the spoken language skills needed to connect, flourish, and thrive.

We are living in an age of technological wonder, where babies who are deaf and hard of hearing have access to listening devices that provide them with lots of exposure to spoken language, much more than they had even fifteen years ago.

While the equipment provides babies with all kinds of access to sound, it is not a cure, it is only a tool. When those devices come off, their hearing levels are significantly compromised. Their developing brains are deprived of the critical information that allows a typically hearing baby to develop spoken language and cognitive skills effortlessly.

When a family receives a hearing loss diagnosis, the news that your baby does not hear what every other baby hears is very upsetting and can interrupt what the family would naturally do with their child. One of the things that happens, especially with babies who are profoundly deaf, is that they start to babble, but they don’t hear anybody babbling back to them, so the baby stops.

This is where Children’s Hearing & Speech Centre comes in. By starting early, we make sure that we do not interrupt that early flow of communication between parent and baby. If we can preserve it, or get it started again, it dramatically changes how rapidly that baby starts to not only understand language but produce it as well.