According to a survey, the hearing health of children under 10 is worrying: 14% of parents have already consulted an ENT specialist.
Children under 10 have hearing health to worry about, says investigation Ifop for the JNA association (National Hearing Day.) In total, 14% of parents say they have consulted an ENT specialist for ringing in the ears in their child, which is far from trivial.
Some ringing or ringing in the ears can be linked to ear infections, but can also be caused by exposure to too much noise. 40% of children under the age of 10 use headphones or earphones every day, this survey also indicates, and children have a shorter ear canal than adults. The sound that reaches the eardrum via the headphones is therefore more aggressive for their ears.
Children under the age of 10 should use headphones or earphones as little as possible, according to Professor Jean Luc Puel, research director at Inserm, and organizer of National Hearing Days. Also, with headphones, parents have a harder time monitoring the listening volume. The risk, for children whose auditory system is exposed to high sound intensity from early childhood, is that they end up at 40 with the same hearing fatigue as a 60-year-old.
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Pay attention to volume and duration
The nature of the sounds we listen to is also important: for a child as for an adult, it is not only the volume of listening that counts, but also daily duration. For an adult, the recommendation is not to exceed eight hours of daily listening at 80 decibels, which also corresponds to 30 minutes of listening at 92 decibels, the volume of music in the discotheque.
Moreover, currently, the vast majority of music and sounds that we listen to on the internet are compressed, they have been packed electronically to bring up the lowest sound levels. These compressed sounds have the advantage of being placed above ambient noise, but the disadvantage is that they no longer contain any silence, which can strain the auditory system more than uncompressed sound. . This has already been proven in animals.
