by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
This piece suggests that you may decrease noise-induced hearing loss in your teenager by limiting personal music player listening to 60% of maximum volume for 60 minutes. I suppose anything is better than nothing, but I’m not sure how one precisely measures 60% of a personal music player’s volume. And if the one-hour limit is repeated several times a day–or the teen doesn’t follow this silly parental rule–I can guarantee that this approach won’t work.
My children are more than a decade past their teens now, so personal music players just weren’t an issue when they were younger. And I’m not sure how I would address the subject, either, but one approach might be to take them to a hearing aid store, or point out older people wearing hearing aids (in this case, one of them happens to be Grandpa) and then to tell them that a hearing aid is in their future if they don’t turn down the volume.
It’s hard for a parent to keep teenagers from doing unsafe or unhealthy things which may have lifelong consequences. The teen brain just isn’t wired that way. And saying to a teen that occasional exposure to loud noise damaging hearing is ok is just like telling him or her that occasional unprotected sex, heroin use, or driving without wearing a seatbelt is okay too, when, obviously, they are not.
The real responsibility for protecting our young falls to governments. We don’t allow people under 18 to smoke. We set an age at which a teenager can get a license to drive a car. They can’t drink alcohol until 21. And maybe they shouldn’t be listening to personal music players until age 15 or 18 as well. At a minimum, the Consumer Product Safety Commission should require warning labels to be placed on personal music players, headphones, and earbuds:
WARNING: USE OF THIS PRODUCT CAN CAUSE HEARING LOSS
Yes, smokers ignore warning labels, but the smoking rate among men has fallen from about 50% in the 1950s to near 20% today. And at least with smoking the government has tried to do something to protect Americans’ health. The federal government should target the causes of hearing damage now, or risk almost an entire generation marked by hearing loss.
