Q: Can you tell me about the psychological trauma
experienced by hearing children of deaf adults, or
problems faced by hearing parents raising deaf children?
A. Short answer: no.
This is a site about people who themselves become deaf after childhood. Forgive me for sounding argumentative but the number of these inquiries has been escalating: you may wish to go back to the start page and review what the site is about.
Alternatively, you may want to search the site using keywords related to children.
See sites for Children of Deaf Adults and Kids of Deaf Adults to address those issues. My story of my own hearing child’s language acquisition is also posted.
As far as hearing parents parenting deaf kids, you’re asking me? The best I can do is offer the kid’s eye view of someone who started losing hearing in childhood. With all the pedagogical authority of an engineer with graduate degrees in ergonomics (i.e. not a pedagogue) I’d say, shoot for the maximum educational challenge the kid can achieve, but supplement with the richest social experience at the earliest age with frequent exposure to other deaf people (regardless of whether the parent chooses to have the kid surgically altered via the cochlear implant “to give her options.”—Mainstream education gave me only one option: being the hopelessly clueless nerd in the front row who missed out on everything except what the teacher said, but did very well in school. Yeah, options. By the time I realized I was deaf, it was impossible to acquire the fluency of sign language that would convince anyone I was a native. I acquired friends but at the expense of a continuous struggle for acceptance. Yeah, options...) I think of the model of Hebrew Sunday School for mainstream Jewish kids whose parents don’t want to send them to Hebrew day school but want them to have cultural/religious education. I also think of the private school model. I don’t understand why people who are different by virtue of being deaf come out of a residential school having been sexually abused and negligibly educated when people who are different by virtue of being born into filthy rich families come out of residential schools having elite networks for life. I just don’t get it. Why is it not possible for a sign-language based residential school to be elite and academically rigourous? (Fifty years after my death, the penny will drop for someone. Just name the school after me, will you?)
However, stepping off the soapbox, this page is not about deaf kids and their hearing parents.
