Skip to main content

My Deaf Kid Does Not Need To Be Fixed

 



Do you remember the game that was really popular around 2021 through 2022 called the Whisper Challenge? A person would wear headphones and listen to music while someone would whisper a phrase. Many people would laugh at the results because they would say the phrase wrong. Now imagine that is your life.  When you have a conversation with someone, you can only get about 40% of what is being said to you.  Would you keep trying or give up when it’s not extremely important?  How would you make your voice be heard? How would you hear what the other person was saying? Wouldn’t it be great if you could understand 100% of the conversation being held? This is the challenge of 48 million people in America alone and many more worldwide. Fortunately, within this population, there is a culture of individuals who have developed and can benefit from their own language with a complexity and grammar structure suited to their culture and needs. Many people are unaware of the complexity of the issues regarding the many modes of communication between the Deaf and the hearing, but there is so much more than that meets the eye. The Deaf community is more than just their inablity to hear and on subjects that affect them the hearing world needs to educate themselves before jumping to conclusions.

Sign Language in various forms across the world has been used by Deaf people as they have had to communicate. Over time the development has undergone many changes just like every other language. They have their language roots across the world with dialects, accents, and variations between ages and cultures. And their languages have been influenced by other cultures just like ours. 

Most Deaf individuals use some form of lip reading but for culturally Deaf people this is not their primary focus. This is because most of the words we speak have sounds that are not easy to differentiate by the way our lips move. While people from the Deaf community are the experts in lip reading, it is not without trials even for them. The process is extremely challenging, frustrating, and can be faulty. This is why there are so many aspects to communication between the two worlds.

The recent technological advancements of the hearing aid and the cochlear implant has caused great controversy within the Deaf community.  It is very common for hearing people to assume that if someone has hearing aids or cochlear implants the Deaf person or the Hard of Hearing person will understand what they are saying. But this isn’t the case. While to some it is a useful tool to solve the problem of communication with the hearing world, it is not at the point where the quality of the technology is as good as the natural working ear.   This unawareness of the limitations of these aids puts all of the pressure on the Deaf person to be ‘fixed’ and able to hear with no problems. While hearing aids and cochlear implants work sometimes, they are not the cure-all solution that many think they are.  


There is another aspect of this controversy because the Deaf community is happy being Deaf and don’t feel the need to be fixed.  Since the Deaf community is small it's a very tight knit community. They see many benefits to being deaf. They enjoy the connections they share and their ability to communicate with visual signals and are proud of the language they have developed and the direct nature of their interactions.  They are aware that they are better suited for some occupations because of the strengths they have developed with their other senses and they do not see themselves as disabled.  The Deaf community is proud of their accomplishments, skills, and talents and they do not want that culture to be stripped away.  

                        

When a child is born Deaf to hearing parents, the doctor and the parents jump to the conclusion that the child needs to be fixed with the use of hearing aids or cochlear implants. This makes hearing parents think sign language is not important since they can accommodate with a combination of lip reading and technology. The problem with this perspective is that the deaf child doesn’t learn sign language and is unable to communicate with others from their natural born culture.  They will miss out on the whole community where their so-called disability is not seen as one. This frustrates the Deaf community because out of the 90% of children born deaf with two hearing parents, only half of the parents learn sign language and use it with their children. 

Imagine now you are playing the whisper challenge again and you were taught sign language. Someone signs to you while you have headphones blaring music. You understand the full sentence. Perhaps the game would no longer be funny but it would be less frustrating. You don’t have to ask them to repeat themselves because you didn’t miss anything. The Deaf culture is so unique because they have the ability to communicate with one another regardless of how loud the surroundings are and they are proud of their abilities, history, and culture. It is a culture rich and complex and often unappreciated and misunderstood by the hearing world.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Parents Need to Shut the H*ll Up and Let Schools Teach LGBT Sex Education

Africa Studio / Shutterstock Across the country recently, there has been an increasing pushback on having LGBTQ+ topics in schools.    Famously, Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act has caused a lot of controversy, with critics calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” law. It prohibits “classroom instruction” about “sexual orientation or gender identity” for kindergarten through grade 3 and instruction that is “not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”    Laws like this one are incredibly vague and may be twisted by people who don’t like the LGBTQ+ community. This kind of legislation is pushing the country in the wrong direction.   According to the American Psychological Association , c urriculum laws that are against the LGBTQ+ community are based on stereotypes and outdated information and they limit access to helpful public health information.   We should be trying to make schools inclusive of the queer community. While I know this idea applies t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Only Way Is Right : Fixing America by Fixing the Children and Their "Loneliness"

  I still remember the first and only time I was summoned to the principal’s office. The weather was sunny, yet cold, much like the dread flowing through my patriotic heart .  It’s a wonder I wasn’t being convicted for any actual crimes, considering the liberal witch who was my ‘teacher’ at the time. I exited the room, ignoring her empty-hearted attempts to soothe my nerves. The woke hoodwinker was just trying to get me to trust her, so she could induct me into her cult of radical   lunatics .    The witch was wrong, of course. Because this was the first day I had ever seen my mother cry, as she had broken down in tears over finding the notes I wrote in middle school detailing my first suicide attempt.    As much as the woke CDC’s research can be trusted, they say suicide was the leading cause of death for stupid little 10–14-year-olds in 2020. These weak, selfish brats will be refer red to as tweenagers, since they do not deserve the re...
Post a Comment
Read more

The role media plays in racism (Revised)

Growing up there was this ongoing joke in my family that the reason I liked Dora so much as a kid was because I looked like her. Even though this was just a silly little joke to comment on the way that I looked as a kid, it does hold some truth. Growing up, the reason I did enjoy watching Dora was because she was a character that I could relate to; she spoke Spanish, had short black hair, and had darker skin color than most of the cartoons that were on at the time. But, as I got older and grew out of my Dora phase I found that it was very hard to find characters in media that looked like me. When I was finally able to find some sort of media that had a character that I could relate to, the character was poorly written and was just a bunch of stereotypes. We see in society today that racial biases have not gone away, media outlets perpetuating racial stereotypes are not helping the case of removing racial biases. I recently finished watching Modern Family. I loved the show but as I was ...
Post a Comment
Read more