Give your daughter the full toolbox
hiya
at the moment leah goes to mainstream school and is doing well. definitly misses out on things but overall doing well . but just like the way you felt she feels like she is the only one in the world whos ears dont work ( thats how she describes herself). i have been told not to teach her sign language as this will make her speech suffer and segregate her further from society, is this wrong should we all learn. i did really want us all to especially just in case her hearing gets worse.
anyway thank you for taking time to help me.
ps
just to add her speech isnt great so i was told to concentrate on this and isl would distract from this.
thanks
IMO (In My Opinion) I think you've been given poor and out-of-date advice. There's some truth, but you haven't been given all the facts.
It is wrong to say that a child is only capable of learning one language. There are millions of children all over the world who grow up speaking two languages. Remember there are hearing children born to deaf parents who can communicate in both sign and spoken languages.
However sign language uses different parts of the brain to spoken language, and the fear behind the advice you've been given is that if your daughter was to concentrate exclusively on sign language, then her skills in spoken language may not develop as well. The worry is that her speech may never be good enough to be accepted by the hearing world. Essentially you are being advised to "force" your daughter to learn speech, a skill that is almost impossible to do well in if you can't hear yourself accurately. Would you ask a child with a permanent limp to run with children whose legs work perfectly, exposing them to ridicule?
The scientific research that I know about advise that the best approach for bringing up deaf/hoh children is to teach them both the spoken language and sign language. I was a governor of a mainstream school where we had a specialist HI (Hearing Impaired) Unit for deaf children and this was our approach - sometimes known as "total communication" or the "full toolbox" - meaning that you give deaf/hoh children every single tool they need to communicate and to find their place in the wider world. It involves improving the children's spoken language skills alongside their signing skills. It's a "both-and" strategy rather than an "either-or" one.
It also involves giving them access to both the deaf (small d) and Deaf (big D) worlds. This gives children the opportunity to make connections with other children like themselves, and to adults who have been in the same or similiar situation.
Essentially it's about giving deaf/hoh children choice.
Please note that children want to be close to their parents, so they will nearly always choose the language of their parents. My advice is that you and your family learn sign language so she is given a genuine choice, and the widest possible language skills, spoken and signed. Language isn't just about fitting into society. It's also about expressing what's inside ourselves. We reveal our personality, our needs, our wants and feelings. We also need to communicate with people who "get" us, who understand where we come from.
Your daughter has grasped the reality that her ears don't work properly. It's the solid truth that has to be faced up to. She will always be missing out on things that hearing people get. She will never fit in 100% into the hearing world. I'm writing as a deaf/hoh person who grew up in a hearing family, went to a hearing school, then university and then worked for two decades in a job surrounded by hearing people. My wife is hearing and my kids are too. I am as integrated into the hearing world as it is possible to be, but I have never fitted in 100%.
And it has come at a big psychological cost. I have grown up believing I am a defective, faulty hearing person. Every day I make embarrassing mistakes and miss out on things that everybody else around me doesn't. To fit into the hearing world, I was taught to pretend that I was hearing too. Every day I have to bluff and kid people that I heard when I didn't. Every day I have to live a lie and be somebody I'm not. The pyschological cost to me is that I have suffered from depression nearly all of my adult life. My concern is that the advice given to you, which was the same given to my parents, may end up making your daughter very miserable in the future.
Finally, I admit that I'm not totally objective here. But since coming onto AllDeaf and reading the stories of other deaf people who were made to grow up in the hearing world, I now know that my experiences are not unusual. If I could go back in time, I would want to have been given the opportunity to have my feet in both the hearing and Deaf world. I still appreciate my ability to function in the hearing world with my speech language, but emotionally I would be much healthier having deaf friends to communicate with in sign language. It's d/Deaf people who "get" me and understand my struggles. Because I didn't get this understanding, I grew up as a loner, and I had the corrosive impression that I was defective and abnormal. Instead of being told to fit in and be somebody I'm not, I should have been shown how to be me.
My prayer is that you help your daughter be the special unique person she is, and to accept that one aspect of that special uniqueness is her deafness. Give her the "full toolbox" to communicate her uniqueness.
