A Unique Family

Grace Consacro and Steve, Lola, Ella, and Max Scher represent a unique family in that all of them are deaf cuers. Steve and Grace have expressed and demonstrated a commitment to raising their three children with avenues of communication readily available to them. To them, Cued Speech was undoubtedly the way they wanted to go.

When the twins, Lola and Ella, were born, the new parents imagined the best for their children. Nothing was going to change that. “We basically had the same expectations that all parents do for their children, I think: our hopes for our children are that they grow up to be happy, healthy, productive adults. When we found out that they were deaf, our expectations didn’t change; we just knew that the path there would change a little bit,” explained Grace.

Of course, that is not to say there were no concerns. “I think our biggest concern for our children early on was getting their communication skills and their language skills up to par,” said the couple. However, thanks to the Schers’ methods, the twins are currently age appropriate and meeting all benchmarks for three-year-olds. “They recently transitioned from early intervention services to the preschool program and the various testing that they went through all showed age-appropriate to above-appropriate receptive, expressive, and cognitive development,” clarified Grace.

Can this be attributed to Cued Speech? The Schers seem to think so. “That was confirmation, to us, that what we had done previously worked. We just want them to continue down the path they are on,” they said.

Exactly what did the Schers do? They took it one step at a time. The twins were implanted at 18 months at Johns Hopkins. “We were a little nervous about [them] undergoing surgery, but we knew the rewards would ultimately be well worth the risks, particularly at a facility like Hopkins, which is one of the leading cochlear implant (CI) programs, and it has since proved to be a great decision for our family,” said the couple.

The rewards were apparent. They were cueing before the implant but tended to do so without their voices. Post implantation, Lola and Ella added a lot of vocalization to their cues. In addition to improvements in hearing auditory information, improvements in their speech occurred as well. “Their speech intelligibility has developed nicely which is a bonus. The point of implantation was to aid language development and to add environmental sounds for safety’s sake. The fact that they have nice speech is a bonus but isn’t why we undertook the surgery.

They now use their audition well but we still cue everything we say, and they need it for clarification and when we are adding new words to their vocabularies,” explained Grace.In fact, Lola’s and Ella’s first words were “shoe” for both (“which proves that a love of shoes is genetic!” said their mother) and their names respectively....or name approximations rather; “Ella’s cue for herself was the “E” handshape at the chin and Lola’s first cue for herself was the “L” handshape, and also at the chin. They added movements to those cues later on. This was at 9 months to 12 months,” clarified Grace.

Now at this point in their journey, Lola and Ella are typical 3-year-olds having fun. “They love art, dress-up, being read to, “reading” their favorite books to us—really books they’ve just memorized, but they THINK they’re reading—and running around singing and dancing and being noisy. They also like pestering their baby brother,” said their proud parents.

In raising their three children, Steve and Grace have divided the responsibilities. Explained Grace, “Steve is the stay at home parent. I’m working full time as a teacher but I’m fortunate in that my schedule allows me plenty of family time. We basically split the responsibilities 50-50 and we both feel that we are equals in terms of encouraging cues and communication and language development.”

Steve and Grace have also faced challenges in raising twins and becoming more aggressive in cueing regularly and consistently. “Aside from the obvious challenges of having twins, the first task that was before us was for Steve and [me] to change our communication mode. Prior to the girls’ birth, we rarely—if ever—cued to each other. We had to change our mindset and really cue, not only directly to the girls but to each other so that the girls would pick up information from us ‘indirectly’.” Furthermore, they faced criticism from others for their decision to use cueing from birth. “Fortunately, for as many people we had tell us that we should try to use sign first or as a ‘bridge’ option, we had people telling us that we were doing just the right thing and that kept us going. Steve was the champion the whole way too,” lauded Grace. The proud parents have many fond memories, but one related to Cued Speech was a milestone for them. The twins “first demonstrated to us that they could understand what we were saying via cues by responding to us saying ‘pattycake’ with clapping their hands and saying ‘where is...’ by looking at the person named, and then the ‘So Big’ game—raising their hands to show how big they were when we cued ‘How big are you?’ They were 9 or 10 months old at this time. Now it seems obvious in retrospect that they were getting and understanding what we were saying but remember, this was fairly new ground. So the first proof that language could develop naturally via CS was tremendously exciting!” exclaimed Grace.

The cueing community has hailed Lola and Ella as prime successes, and Max is soon to follow. When asked about the community’s reactions, the parents replied, “Gosh, that is an interesting question. Maybe we’re oblivious to that. We don’t know exactly that we know the community’s reaction. We are just happy that we have finally won over our parent-infant teacher—somewhat. I
think we’re just trying hard to be good parents the only way we know how and of course it’s gratifying that our kids are turning out well and part of that is due to hard work on our part and part of that is due to pure sheer luck, I think.”

However, members of the cueing community are quick to praise Steve and Grace. Hilary Franklin warmly noted that “the willingness of Steve and Grace to allow their children to be videotaped for research is nothing short of outstanding. Their girls proved that cued language input can be decoded as early as 9 months of age, possibly sooner, and that expressive cued language can soon follow. Theoretically, we all knew this was possible, but to see it happen and be able to show the process to others is just icing on the cake.”

Aaron Rose also had nothing but warm praise. “As the world’s first family composed of deaf cuers, the Scher- Consacro family has a lot of eyes on them. Yet Steve and Grace have never faltered from their responsibilities, both as parents and as representatives of the Cued Speech community. As the ‘uncle’ of their children, I look forward to watching Ella, Lola, and Max grow up.”

The Schers summed it up well when they said, “We basically have been confirmed in our belief that CS can work for young children. Our kids cue very fluently now.” Indeed, their children are a testament to Cued Speech’s ability to have a positive, profound impact on language and speech from an early age, in spite of the naysayers out there.

Click to expand...