This year, March 3 is the 17th National Ear Care Day and the 4th International Ear Care Day. The theme of this year’s Ear Care Day is “Concern for Children’s Hearing Health”. Children are the future of our country and the hope of our families, so how can we make sure they have healthy hearing? Here’s how to take care of your child’s delicate ears and protect their healthy hearing. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to protect the ears from the perspective of each structure of the ear. The first is the auricle, which we can see at a glance. The auricle is the most familiar external structure of the ear. It hides on the sides of the skull, but is responsible for collecting sound waves. Children’s auricles are more susceptible to frostbite on cold, dry days because of their delicate skin and rich blood vessels than adults, so you should pay attention to keeping your auricles warm when you go out in winter. The inner part of the auricle is the external auditory canal. It is an important sound transmitter for our ears. Children’s outer ear canals are much shorter than adults’. For children who are very imitative, you need to be wary of children using ear scoops and matchsticks to pull out their ears like adults do. In addition, children are not sensitive to discomfort in the external ear canal and mild hearing loss because of their young age, so some children are unaware of the large amount of cerumen blocking the external ear canal and are often discovered occasionally by their parents. You can soak the cerumen in sodium bicarbonate solution until it is soft and then rinse it out with clean water, which is painless and safe. If you accidentally get water in your ear while bathing or swimming with your child, please don’t panic, just turn your head sideways with your ear down and bounce on one foot a few times to control most of the water. It is important to know that the occasional water in the ears will not cause any serious consequences, as long as it is controlled and dried in time. However, frequent diving and diving may damage the child’s immature ears. There are also young children who like to play with foreign objects in their ears, which eventually cannot be removed. One child once inserted a soybean grain into the outer ear canal, and because the soybean absorbed water and swelled up, it caused severe pain, so he came to our hospital, and because the child could not cooperate, he was eventually hospitalized under general anesthesia to have the soybean removed. So you should try to avoid giving your child something tiny as a toy. The innermost part of the external auditory canal is the thin and taut tympanic membrane, which is an important structure for sensing sound vibrations. It is sensitive to strong sound waves, such as firecracker explosions, loud music, and shouting in the ear, which can cause perforation of the eardrum or hearing loss if you are not careful. Therefore, children should stay away from deafening fireworks, don’t wear headphones for a long time to listen to music at high volume, and don’t play with each other by shouting in each other’s ears like a prank. In previous years, I have seen more than one child who had their ears blown up by firecrackers during the Chinese New Year, resulting in aural lacerations, tympanic membrane congestion, perforation and hearing loss, so I am in favor of the fireworks restrictions this year. On the inside of the tympanic membrane are the sound-transmitting structures of the middle ear: the three auditory tuberosities and accessory structures, and the inner ear, which is deep inside the bone. They are all important hearing transmitters and receptors. Because the eustachian tube of the middle ear is thicker, shorter and straighter in children than in adults, it is susceptible to attack by bacteria and viruses from the nasopharynx, and the incidence of acute otitis media in children is much higher than in adults. The majority of children with acute otitis media can be cured with the proper application of ear drops and oral anti-inflammatory drugs. Although children’s auditory bones are well developed, the structure is fragile, and the hearing cells in the inner ear are even more delicate, if not unbearable. With the increasing popularity of electronic products, children love them even more, but care should be taken to avoid letting them develop the habit of wearing headphones for a long time, because children are young and ignorant, and their control of the volume is too arbitrary, and they like the stimulation of loud volume, which in the long run is very likely to damage the hearing and nerve cells of the inner ear. When a child is sick, anxious parents should not panic and blindly give their children antibiotics and antipyretics without the advice of a professional doctor, because certain antibiotics such as gentamicin and other aminoglycoside antibiotics, and certain antipyretic and analgesic drugs have irreversible damaging effects on the inner ear. A considerable number of deaf children we see in our clinic have lifelong regrets due to the application of similar ototoxic drugs at an early age! Therefore, if a young child is found to be unresponsive to sound or shows signs of delayed speech development, it is best to have their hearing checked by the ENT department as soon as possible to rule out early cases of deafness. With the advancement of technology, we can now wear hearing aids for deaf children or implant advanced cochlear implants, which can often save some of the children’s hearing and allow them to return to the world of sound and live and grow normally and happily. Finally, on the occasion of Ear Care Day, as an ENT doctor, I call on the whole society to pay attention to and protect children’s hearing health, learn and spread the knowledge of ear health so that every child can grow up healthy and happy!