Table 4.

Sample Quotations from Child and Parent Open-Ended Interviews

Topic	Quote
	Child	Parent-Proxy
Noisy Environments	8-year-old boy: “There’s a lot of people and the teacher mutes the transmitter before you go to the cafeteria and I can hear my friends okay but sometimes just the cafeteria that’s really loud.”	Father of 12-year-old boy: “One of the things that I notice, I play music, but he was never interested in music really…he used to complain about the drum being loud.”
Academic Functioning	7-year-old boy: “Reading takes forever”; 10-year-old girl: “My teacher is good because she understands why we are deaf and when I tell her I can’t understand her, and she speak it again, she don’t make the attitudes.”	Mother of 7-year-old girl: “Sometimes she gets stuck, I’ll be like write your own sentence, and she’s like, ‘I don’t know, help me.’…Little things, but everything does take a lot longer.”
Child Acceptance	8-year-old boy: “I’m just completely normal, but I have CIs.”	Mother of 9-year-old boy: “I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that. He said, ‘I want red!’ and I was like, oh God of all the colors. But he did it, I let him do it, and I got over it, because he wanted it.”
Oral Communication	10-year-old girl: “When I’m speaking low – they’ll tell me, ‘What are you saying?’ and ‘huh’?’ So, I have to speak very loud and they understand me.”	Mother of a 9-year-old boy: If the kids are sarcastic, he doesn’t get it, because he doesn’t get that sarcasm. He doesn’t hear it.
Social Functioning	6-year-old girl: “They only make fun of me if they see me with a short haircut [because they can see the device].”	Mother of 8-year-old boy: “We were at Disney World and there was this little girl and she was so super shy and she was just looking at him with this big huge smile. She had an implant too and he was like,’Mom look she has ears like me’…He gets really excited when he sees other kids with ears like him.”
Fatigue	12-year-old boy: “I get up and go to eat, come back and get ready and put {my CI] on…which is about an hour…because when I start to hear it gets loud, it’s loud at first.”	Mother of 8-year-old boy; “I find that when…he comes home he is sometimes exhausted because he has had to give 110% towards trying to focus.”
Emotional Functioning	7-year-old boy: “Sometimes it really makes me upset [when someone asks about my CIs].”	Mother of 8-year-old boy: “he gets mad because he’ll be like “I can’t hear!”…because you know kids are kids and are going to be yelling and screaming and he’s like “what did you say?”
Device Management	9-year-old girl: “But sometimes I wear it for a long time and then [the magnet site] just hurts.”	Mother of 10-year-old-boy: “[sweat damage] is frequent during the summer, I have to have the dryer on all the time, if not it gets damaged from the sweating and I did get the sweat guards already, you know.”
Behavior	N/A	Mother of 8-year-old boy: “I find that when…he comes home [from school he is] sometimes exhausted because he has had to give 110% towards trying to focus”.