Loss of hearing difficult to understand
“Dad,” shouts Alice Pendergrast, 56. “Are your hearing aids in?”
“What’s that?” he asks. “What’d you say?”
Smiling knowingly, she raises her voice and looks him square in the eye: “Put your hearing aids in, Dad!”
“You’re talking about eight what?”
“Not ‘eight,’ Dad, ‘aids.’ Hearing aids,” Alice shouts, and he reluctantly puts them in.
It’s a typical family dinner in the household of Brodie Pendergrast, 91, when he and his wife, Helen, 82, are visited by their daughters and their husbands, all of them baby boomers born after 1946. Sometimes, his hearing aids don’t help enough, so he puts on a $25 set of Radio Shack earphones that amplify sounds. They’re easier to put on and don’t require adjustments.
Though it’s obvious the Pendergrasts are a loving family, they also typify a growing problem that’s causing friction and frustration in millions of households. With more than 31 million hard-of-hearing Americans – a large chunk of them boomers who are starting to say “huh,” too – communication between elderly parents and their 50-something children is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s become another hurdle to be jumped, another rite of passage.
In the 1960s, boomers and their parents fought over long hair, casual dress, sexual attitudes and the Vietnam War. Now, experts say, they’re yelling at each other over health issues, like hearing.
A comprehensive new survey by the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1973 to educate the public about hearing loss, found that 31.5 million Americans are hard of hearing – about half of them boomers. But only 23 percent of people who are hard of hearing wear devices in their ears. The elderly are embarrassed, and for boomers, it’s mostly vanity, says Chuck Underwood, president of the Generational Imperative research firm, which studies people in different age groups.
Boomers, he adds, hate to admit that their hearing is going the way of flat stomachs and naturally colored hair.
