Don’t Blame Yourself: How We Flew Under the Radar for 15 Months
If you’re the parent of a deaf child, especially one that manages to avoid early detection from newborn hearing screenings, you might find yourself with a lot of guilt. Though my son did fail his newborn hearing screening, he later somehow passed an otoacoustic emission test (OAE) and was declared hearing until 15 months [...]
My Two Cents: Cochlear Implants
I used to feel sorry for children who had cochlear implants. I did. When I saw them it broke my heart because I really believed that their parents just didn’t understand deafness. I judged those parents. I assumed that the parents were looking for a quick fix to something that in my opinion didn’t [...]
Cued Speech and ASL—Why I Use Both
When we first confirmed my son was deaf, I had several communication choices presented to me by his Early Intervention coordinator. I had never heard of cued speech, and at first I was ready to dismiss it solely because it was not the dominant form of communication among Deaf people. But when an advocate of [...]
From Sesame Street to Self-Discovery
Ninety-five percent of deaf children have hearing parents. What does that mean? It means that many of us are used to being the only deaf person in the family, in the community, or in school unless we are at a deaf school. It means that our family is our first introduction to the ways [...]
Your Child’s Best Advocate
“The best defense is a good offense.” These are words to live by for parents advocating for their deaf child. While the professionals—doctors, therapists, teachers, early intervention coordinators, school boards—may truly believe they have the child’s best interests in mind, it is up to the parents to digest all their recommendations and stand up [...]
Announcing Deaf Echo’s Parents of Deaf Children Information Page
Deaf Echo has begun an ongoing project to make crucial yet balanced information about deafness available for parents of deaf children. We are attempting to do a few things here that, to the best of our knowledge, are either not being done or else are not being done to the extent needed. Deaf Echo’s [...]
A Flawed System
There was a brief time when I could not have cared less if my deaf son ever knew any ASL. I wanted him only to be oral. I figured if he got a cochlear implant, he wouldn’t “need” sign language, so why learn it? As irrational as it sounds, I almost feared him becoming [...]
Does disability really need to be ‘fixed’?
(Illustration by Adrean Clark) Every time there is an advance in surgical audiology or genetic engineering, a wave of alarm ripples through the signing community. Doctors are intent on eradicating deafness. They subscribe to the belief that there’s something wrong with being deaf. So they make it their business to try to fix it, hoping [...]
Bilingualism Is Not Just For Deaf Children
A story, if you will, about bilingualism. It’s too often presented as an educational approach designed to give deaf children access to language. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. It also gives hearing children access to their signing deaf parents. If there exists the antithesis of parents who are caught by surprise at [...]
I Speak and Talk, Too
I don’t normally like audiologists and speech therapists. But my perspective on talking and speaking was forever changed by an audiologist, and I will always be grateful to her for that. Her name was Venita Gragg, and I was a 4th grade student at Maryland School for the Deaf, Columbia Campus when I met her. [...]