“Who has my headphones!?”

“Who has my headphones!?” how many times have I heard that in my house of five children? If its not said once a day its only because my kids are at their mothers house. I have even found myself saying that too. Why do my kids even need them heck why do I need them? Well to answer my own question I don’t believe anyone in my house has the same taste in music and now that my oldest has gotten her siblings to listen to foreign music. The variety has jumped to levels that I can’t even count. How is that wrong you ask well it’s not that my kids are downloading music off of pirated sites it’s not that I don’t understand half of what they say it’s that they spend every waking hour with those headphones in their ears and doing that is causing damage to their hearing permanently.

With the start of creating walkmans you could listen to 30 minutes to an hour of music from every tape or CD. Then you would have to flip it over or change it and when you took that break sometimes you would put it down. Now at the touch of a few buttons you can have tens of thousands of hours that you don’t even have to touch it to listen to music all day long. I have even found my kids asleep with their headphones in.

 To tell you the truth it’s not even the lack of social interaction that I want to address even though that is another issue all on its own. Its “HEY DAD WHATS FOR DINNER!!”  “why are you yelling at me?” “IM NOT YELLING!!” “Yes you are your voice is very elevated.” Then it takes a second for them to lower their voice. Or along the same lines “what do you want for dinner? Hey I said what do you want for dinner? Are you even listening to me? Hello!?” “ oh sorry dad I didn’t hear you, What do you want?” “ you couldn’t hear me we are sitting two feet apart on the same couch” “well I had my head phones in.” it just makes me want to screem. I know that many parents have said the same thing and had the same conversations with their children.

 What’s wrong with that? It’s the abuse that our kids do to their hearing. Its only now that I’ve gotten older has it been apparent that I too am suffering from hearing loss. As a teen I sat for hours a day in front of the computer playing games and listening to music or isolating in my room with my music so loud in my walkman that it would drowned out my nagging sister and mother.

This article on abc7 in Los Angeles draws my attention it talks about how a group of kids that went to a concert that the range of music decibels from 85 to 100 after the concert is showed that 71% had some time of abnormality. Then this article was written more recently taken from the journal of American medical association “Between 1988-94 and 2005-06, the percentage of teens with hearing loss jumped by about a third, from 15% of 12-to-19-year-olds to 19.5%.

What about IPods? Well I found this article in Time that said many things like the amount of iPods sold 173 million. Well I found a article saying that the numbers in January 2011 taken from apples quarterly reports were 304 million. It talks about the range from 7% t0 24% of people listen to risky levels of decibels. It also talks about a study done in 2006

I feel that the culture of listening to music with ear buds is not only in our culture but its worldwide I have ;looked into the study that the CNU did and it leads me to believe that we are on a trend that is very unhealthy to us and especially our children according to the time article about how a lot of teens do the exact opposite of what I tell them. i only see this going bad for us and how my kids will lose their hearing before me. sells in headphones will countinue to grow though and the designes will still still be cool. i wonder how cool my kids will feel with a hearing aid.