This paper explores differences in pragmatic skills between children who have cochlear implants and their hearing peers. Recordings of 10-minute conversations between 10 children with cochlear implants (children with age-equivalent language scores) and a hearing peer were transcribed. Conversation analysis supplies insights into interactional troubles not evident in wider measures of number of turns, requests for clarification, topic initiation and so on employed in earlier studies. How the children go about repair proves of particular interest; other-initiated repair that causes the speaker to repeat the prior utterance is, not surprisingly, more commonly generated by the children who have cochlear implants. The key contribution of this paper, however, is to detail examples where children with cochlear implants choose not to initiate repair of an error made by their hearing friend. The debate not only points out the interactional cost of initiating repair, but also shows that not doing repair can cause a breakdown in conversation.