Parental expectations and experiences of their child’s cochlear implantations

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Cochlear Implantation (CI) has become a most popular amplification option for children with severe, to profound pre-lingual deafness, in both developed and developing countries. Although several studies have done in other countries in terms of parental perspectives of CI, enough studies have not done to describe relationships of expected and true outcomes of CI in Sri Lankan context. OBJECTIVES: To describe parental pre-implant expectations and post-implant experiences of their child’s CI. METHODS: A descriptive cross-sectional study design was implemented, employing a self-administered questionnaire. A purposive sampling method was utilized for recruiting parents from a special pre-school setting and two cochlear rehabilitation centers. The survey compared parents’ pre-implant expectations with their post-implant experiences in five domains: communication abilities, general function, social skills, academic achievements and happiness and well-being. Results: The participants comprised of 44 child/parent pairs of 38 mothers and 6 fathers. There was no statistically significant difference between parents’ pre-implant expectations and post-implant experiences, except in the communication abilities domain (P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The overall findings indicated that the majority of parents’ pre-implant expectations met with their post-implant experiences. Parents were satisfied with their decision to proceed with CI and accordingly the anticipated improvements achieved by their children after CI. The study suggested that parents should be supported to synthesize more realistic expectations to perceive the outcomes optimistically as child’s progression takes time.