Parents and teachers often ask kids to “turn their listening ears on.” But 5-year-old Cooper Carlson of Minnesota made the conscious decision to turn his listening ears off.
In a TikTok video that received 8.5 million views in three weeks, Cooper, who has profound hearing loss in both ears, ripped off his cochlear implants in the middle of a conversation with his mom and said, “BREAK!”
“What?” his mom, photographer Beth Leipholtz, asked verbally and in sign language.
“BREAK! I need a break,” Cooper explained.
After a moment, Leipholtz asked why Cooper needed a break. As it turned out, Cooper, in a relatable way, simply wanted a break from “TALKING.”
Pausing to laugh, Leipholtz asked, “What if I want a break from you talking? I don’t have a cool superpower like you.”
Cooper had a solution for her: purchase cochlear implants.
“But who’s going to put that in my head?” Leipholtz asked.
“My audiologist!” Cooper replied in his sweet preschool voice. Those two words somehow conveyed both maturity and a sense of, “Duh, Mom.”
Cooper was born in Sept. 2019 with a genetic condition called Waardenburg syndrome. According to the Cleveland Clinic, this condition can affect the coloring of your skin, hair and eyes. It may also cause hearing loss.
After he failed to pass his newborn hearing test, his parents brought him to an audiologist for testing and learned that he had full sensorineural hearing loss in both ears. Tufts of white hair also fit with his Waardenburg syndrome diagnosis.
To help process her son’s diagnosis and connect with parents in a similar position, Leipholtz began a social media account called “Beth & Coop.”
Following social media accounts for families with children who were “a couple of years down the road” from where they were after Cooper’s diagnosis was “a lifeline” for Leipholtz. She hopes to provide that same support for families of newly diagnosed kids. Plus, the account is a way for her to educate people about cochlear implants and deaf culture.
The takeaway of the account is that though their family may have some unique qualities, Leipholtz and her son still have the same challenges as any other family … like the nightly bedtime struggle, for example.
Leipholtz is also finding new and inventive ways to educate people about differently abled kids, including rereleasing her picture book, “The ABCs of Inclusion,” which features 26 kids with diagnoses like autism, hearing loss, epilepsy, and Down syndrome.
As Cooper grows, Leipholtz has been having more and more age-appropriate conversations with her son about social media and his role in it to make sure he approves of his life being shared. In fact, they had been having one of these conversations when Cooper “muted” her in the viral video.
“I clearly didn’t know he was going to turn into this little human with so much personality,” Leipholtz tells TODAY.com.
Cooper proves that a diagnosis and a sense of humor are not mutually exclusive.
