When George won't wear his cochlear implants

George has now been implanted for over 18 months and has always been a great wearer of his hearing devices. Even as a baby with his hearing aids, he wore them 'all waking hours', except for when he took them out to have a nibble, of course! When he got his cochlear implants, it was much the same.

So it’s been a surprise to us recently that George has started to refuse wearing his cochlear implants. George turned two in March, and at the time I thought we got away with the terrible two’s very lightly, but six months later and those terrible two’s have hit… hard!

He also became a big brother in May, and so I do put his refusal to wear his 'ears' down to both these things.

We recently went through a three-week period when George would absolutely refuse to put his ears on in the morning. It could be 8am and I was bribing my two-year-old with chocolate buttons already!

He soon clicked on to my bribery tactic and this stopped working, so I moved on to putting something on TV he liked. This also worked for a while, but then he would be running away from me when I was trying to put them on. In the end, I decided to give him longer to wake up and wait for him to be ready to put his ears on. This could be a good hour after he had woken up.

Throughout the day, if one of his ears came off for whatever reason, he would pull the other one off too. It was almost impossible to get them back on, and we often had a tug-of-war as I tried to stop him from pulling the cable in case he damaged it.

I was cautious to not fight and force him to wear them, as I didn’t want him to view them negatively, so I started letting him lead the way with when he wore them.

This resulted in his listening hours halving from what it had previously been. I decided to call audiology to ask where we were on the waiting list for his mapping appointment that was actually due some months earlier. I advised them of the challenges I was facing and explained I thought a lot of it was behavioural, but I said I wanted to have his mapping checked in case that's what was bothering him and something needed tweaking.

On arrival at hospital, George walked in happily, being as loud as ever actually. Even in the audiology waiting room, he was making a nuisance of himself but having a good time. We were called into the sound booth, and the audiologist took one of George’s cochlear implants to connect to the computer. Immediately, George removed the other cochlear implant. I knew at this point we were about to have a battle on our hands. And a battle he gave me, it was World War 3!

We spent 1 hour and 20 minutes in that room… and he probably had his ears on for a grand total of 10 minutes. Strangely enough, I was just glad that the audiologist could see what I had been dealing with all these months!

George now has a quieter setting on his ears which we are trialling for two weeks to see if that improves things. Then we will go back to (hopefully) do a hearing test, with a plan to not remove his ears when he comes in!

After the appointment, we went to Costa for some cake, and low and behold… George let me put his ears back on no issues at all! It just shows that he knows his own mind and will do what he wants to, when he wants to.

For any other parents going through this, I’d say don’t panic. Things have improved for us over the months, and he's now getting more wear out of his ears than he had been. It’s easy to worry that your child is rejecting their 'ears', but maybe it’s just a two-year-old wanting to assert their own authority.