Two to three percent of the total population has a hearing loss, and the same percentage applies to kids. There’s more than one kind of childhood hearing loss. There’s congenital hearing loss, which occurs during pregnancy or immediately after birth. There’s post congenital and pre-lingual hearing loss, which happens before a child develops language skills.

Children can have various types of delays: cognitive, motor, speech or language delays. A developmental delay is when a child does not meet established benchmarks in development for their age in their speech, language comprehension, motor or physical skills.

Visual impairments refer to any condition that only allows a child to see with a restricted field of vision. There is a range of conditions and syndromes and the level to which children are affected depends on how severe the visual impairment is. Visual impairment may range from having limited vision to having some functional vision.

It’s important to understand that speech and language development go hand-in-hand together. A speech delay has to do with how a child is saying his or her sounds. Language delay is a difficulty in understanding words and their meaning and an inability to put them together into phrases. When a child lacks sufficient vocabulary to express oneself, it can be similar to the feeling one has when beginning to learn a new language and not being able to communicate.