"You're talking about eight what?"

"Not 'eight,' Dad, 'aids.' Hearing aids," Alice shouts, and he reluctantly puts them in.

It's a typical family dinner in the household of Brodie Pendergrast, 91, when he and his wife, Helen, 82, are visited by their daughters and their husbands, all of them baby boomers born after 1946. Sometimes, his hearing aids don't help enough, so he puts on a $25 set of Radio Shack earphones that amplify sounds. They're easier to put on and don't require adjustments.

Though it's obvious the Pendergrasts are a loving family, they also typify a growing problem that's causing friction and frustration in millions of households. With more than 31 million hard-of-hearing Americans — a large chunk of them boomers who are starting to say "huh", too — communication between elderly parents and their 50-something children is becoming increasingly difficult. It's become another hurdle to be jumped, another rite of passage.

In the 1960s, boomers and their parents fought over long hair, casual dress, sexual attitudes and the Vietnam War. Now, experts say, they're yelling at each other over health issues, like hearing.

A comprehensive new survey by the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1973 to educate the public about hearing loss, found that 31.5 million Americans are hard of hearing — about half of them boomers. But only 23 percent of people who are hard of hearing wear devices in their ears. The elderly are embarrassed, and for boomers, it's mostly vanity, says Chuck Underwood, president of the Generational Imperative research firm, which studies people in different age groups.

Boomers, he adds, hate to admit that their hearing is going the way of flat stomachs and naturally colored hair.

What's more, lots of elderly people think hearing aids are too expensive and don't like having to fool with the high-tech gizmos, which require frequent battery changes and adjustments of tiny dials by not-so-nimble fingers, he says. And members of the GI Generation, now in their 80s, simply aren't the types to complain.

Their sons and daughters, however, "have that passionate core value of attacking the aging process with all of their fury, refusing to let aging get the best of them, fighting to squeeze every day of every week of every year for all of its satisfactions," Underwood says.

Boomers are bewildered and frustrated that older folks seem shy about taking advantage of new tools that could help them, says Steven Mintz, an expert on generational differences at the University of Houston.

"We get a flood of interest around the holidays when people are together, complaining of problems communicating," says Carole Rogin, president of the Hearing Industries' Association. "Boomers are annoyed that they have a hard time communicating with their folks."

Ask most any boomer, like M. Ayres Gardner, 55, of Decatur, who says his father and mother-in-law "have severe hearing impairments" but seldom wear their hearing aids and have "infuriated various people." Or Danette McLaurin Glass, 43, of Alpharetta, who speaks with her mom in Charlotte daily and is often annoyed "because it sounds like she is yelling" at her dad, who avoids using his hearing aids.

Linda Wish, 56, of Atlanta says she resents "having to always repeat myself" in conversations with her parents. And Mark Cole of Lilburn says folks visiting his mother-in-law "are sick and tired of shouting and repeating. . . . The strain this puts on my family manifests itself in many ways."

Dr. Richard Carmen, a 60-year-old audiologist in Sedona, Ariz., and author of the new book "How Hearing Loss Impacts Relationships" (Auricle Ink Publishers), says both boomers and their parents need to be more understanding of one another because even necessary voice-raising "can lead to very serious family conflicts."

William Ostrander, 75, of Dunwoody says his wife began to accuse him a decade ago of "not paying attention" when she spoke, but he largely ignored her, causing considerable friction.

"After you start asking, 'Would you repeat that?' and say 'Huh' a lot, it finally begins to dawn on you that there's a problem," he says.

So when his children "encouraged" his getting hearing aids, he caved in, says the Georgia Tech-trained mechanical engineer. Now he wears hearing aids and has amplifiers on his home phones.

The problem for the Pendergrasts has only occasionally strained family relations, but it also has caused unexpected problems.

Callie Pendergrast, 50, is so used to "yelling" at her dad that she often speaks loudly outside his home.

"I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, 'Would you mind lowering your voice? I can hear you fine.' I feel like a commentator at a sports event."

Dr. Douglas E. Mattox, chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery at the Emory University School of Medicine, says people who are detecting hearing loss should visit their primary physician or an ear-nose-throat doctor to check for problems other than normal aging that could be causing it.

"A lot of us live longer, and hearing loss is increasing, and the help is there," he says.

Mintz says, "The burden of assisting and understanding the elderly is faced by a larger number of middle-aged adults than every before." Boomers should realize this, he says, because more than 7 percent of people between 29 and 40 are already having hearing loss.

In general, men lose hearing before women do, probably because males traditionally have worked in noisier environments, says Dr. Gail Whitelaw, president of the American Academy of Audiology. She says people who think their hearing is slipping should see their doctor for a reference to a trained audiologist, who holds either a master's degree or a doctorate in the field.

People with hearing loss seldom know whom to see, how much hearing aids should cost, or that Medicare doesn't pay for them, she says. Hearing aids range from less than $1,000 to $8,000, but people just don't want to face they have to spend so much, Whitelaw says.

Older people often "come in with an attitude, saying if people of the boomer generation learned to enunciate better, there wouldn't be a problem," she says.

For boomers, it's tough to tell parents they need hearing aids, she says, but they should.

For now, the Pendergrast daughters will keep pestering their dad to wear his hearing aids.

"We have many family dinners and get-togethers throughout the year," Alice Pendergrast says. "And it is harder and harder to include him in conversations and games. It doesn't have to be this way."

By Bill Hendrick