No sight, no sound, nowhere to turn (The Virginian-Pilot - HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com)
Those of us who are merely deaf, yes, merely deaf, should read this article.
We are merely deaf. It provides some perspective.
Those in the field say deaf-blind children are fully capable of learning once someone figures out how each child communicates. Some, such as Alex, use violent rocking to communicate; others use another activity such as jumping. Children can learn to communicate by using sign language, done in the palm of their hand.
I’m an intervener in Vancouver BC, and I was really happy to see this article. The difficulty for deaf-blind people is the amount of information about their environment that they don’t get (we tend to refer to deaf-blindness as an “information-gathering disability”), which hearing/sighted people - and blind hearing and deaf sighted people - take for granted.
Imagine that you’re a kid in class and your friend throws an eraser at the teacher. You’ll pretty quickly hear and/or see your friend getting in trouble from the teacher - but not if you’re deaf-blind, unless someone tells you.
Everything that you learned by seeing, or hearing, things happen around you just isn’t there for deaf-blind people.
For those who are involved with deaf-blind children, I implore you, I beg you, I entreat you, do anything and everything you possibly can to get as much language into that child before he/she hits puberty as you can. Be it ASL (although it will have to be dumbed-down a bit, usually, as it’s hard for deaf-blind people to pick up the facial grammar of ASL because usually they can’t see it), hand-under-hand signing, picture-symbols for kids who have residual vision, two-hand manual alphabet in the hand, Braille-typing on the fingers as they do in Japan sometimes… whatever it takes, you need to stuff that kid’s mind with language all day, every day, via every channel you can think of.
Comment by Doug Barr — July 30, 2007 @ 3:51 am
I am the parient of Two Deaf Blind girls ages 13 and 9 and it takes my wife and I everything in our power to fight for them. The system is failing our disabled children in school. we live in Virgina Beach. Deaf Blind children need communication or they will NEVER learn. Hand under Hand has been Great for our girls but the school resist any suggestions we make. how sad it is to stick our kids in a black hole because of the schools low expectations. Thanks for letting me Vent.
Comment by Robert Borum — August 8, 2007 @ 9:10 pm