Parent group meetings are held at Children's Hospital Waltham campus on evenings and Saturdays. Parents of children of any age or degree of hearing loss are invited to meet other parents, share refreshments, and listen to informational presentations. Child care is provided by student interns.

The Audiology staff at Children's Hosptial developed a spiral-bound Hearing Aid Handbook which provides parent-friendly instructions and illustrations showing how to operate a child's hearing aids. This handbook is given free of charge to families who are fitted with hearing aids through the Sound Start hearing aid loan program.

Audiologists explain the operation and benefits of cochlear implantation in a family-friendly, non-commercial, manner, augmented by video clips of children listening with their implants in the context of their family life and school. Further DVDs on surgery and follow-up are planned. An earlier DVD, created with the support of the Caroline Bass Fund, called A Sound Decision, continues to be a popular way for adolescents contemplating cochlear implantation to learn about this option from other young teens who share their experiences.

Each child who enters Children's Hospital in Boston for cochlear implant surgery is well prepared with a backpack of activities and age-appropriate comforts. The team psychologists use the items in the backpack to help the child address anxieties prior to the surgery.

Evening meetings for teens with hearing loss are hosted by a staff member from Children's Hospital and a young adult professional guest facilitator who has hearing loss. The teens are juniors or seniors in high school. They share pizza and develop new friendships while learning information about self-advocacy, equipment, strategies, and services that will help them to succeed in college.

Boston Children's Hospital's educational audiology program, Sound Outreach to Schools (SOS), extends habilitative audiology support outside the clinic. A full-time educational audiologist helps students and teachers use complex hearing technology in the classrooms, creating greater support for children with cochlear implants or hearing aids. SOS trains educators on a student's specific hearing loss and hearing technology, delivers personalized instructions with pictures of student's actual equipment and simulations of the hearing loss with and without their hearing devices, and provides equipment troubleshooting and classroom acoustical assessments. This flagship program, a national model in the making, could not have been launched without the support of the Caroline Bass Fund.

Hearing Aid Listening Check Video: How to do a hearing aid listening check. Information about why a hearing aid listening check is needed, who should do the listening check, when it should be done and what you need to have on hand to perform the listening check.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires each state to provide early intervention services. How and what each state provides varies. This link will provide you an overview of the law often called "IDEA Part C".

Parent Advocacy Training Course AG Bell's free online course helps parents and educators build knowledge and confidence as they become advocates for their children living with hearing loss and work with local school districts and service providers.

Sound Foundation for Babies is a habilitation tool supporting parents for the first 12 months following cochlear implantation. The tool consists of 40 self-contained sets of goals (in a week-by-week format) in the areas of audition, receptive language, expressive language and speech, as well as a song and story book.

Sound Foundation for Toddlers follows on from Sound Foundation for Babies, supporting parents through the second year after cochlear implantation. This resource is designed for children of 24 to 36 months of age, who receive their cochlear implant around 12 months of age.