hardofhearingchildren.com by PAM Candlish MLS
"What did you say?" "Eh?" "WHAT did you say?" "MM?" "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" oh "PARDON ME!"

Parents Want a Happy Child who turns into a Happy Adult.

Hug Your Parents instead of Blaming Them.

I have been under attack lately from some very angry people who think their parents made the wrong choices when they were children. As hard of hearing adults, they seem to want to have the ability to sign, and they want to go on blaming their poor parents for making the wrong choices. I feel it is simple: if you as a hard of hearing adult want to sign, or be part of the Deaf culture, then get off your duff and learn to sign. It takes about a year, if you are motivated. Go to Gallaudet and take some courses. I do not believe that you will ever be part of the Deaf Culture because God made you a "hearie" but you might succeed and be a truly bi-lingual person between the two worlds. You should thank your parents for giving you speech because you will not get speech from the Deaf Culture.

Anger and Rejection from the Deaf Culture

When Reid was little in the late 1980's, teenaged  hearing-impaired and deaf children of hearing parents were hazed for membership in the Deaf culture by rejection of the hearing parents. This was documented in an article in Life magazine, and a good part of Deaf myths too. There was never one second in my life which I would tolerate being rejected as a parent for cultural reasons, hence sign was not my first choice of a method to communicate with the child. The rest of the world does not sign, and I choose speech for my child and my family. The Deaf culture and its representatives were brutal in their rejection of my hard of hearing child, right from the beginning. The anger of other parents whose children had "failed" from the oral method to sign made collective action and mutual support impossible.

Oral Method not Efficient

The method of speech used in the schools for the Deaf was oral, which involved talking to the child who would magically talk. They had infrequent group speech lessons on auditory trainers which was not sufficient to make speech possible for most hearing-impaired children. At best they sounded funny, very marked as DEAF because of the natural nasality. The oral method had already failed for Reid when he was re-diagnosed at age two and had speech abilities of a 0-6 month baby. The method which we used with Reid was the auditory-verbal method as developed by the Lings and Doreen Pollack and Helen Beebe. It is an intensive method which has been very good for the people who choose it and used it all day long, every day. Reid has had over12,000 hours of auditory-verbal therapy one-on-one from me during his life.

 "Well all it takes is Interested Parents"

My grandson Jonathan was at the audiologist the other day and I came close to screaming as I heard the audie say, "Well all it takes is interested parents" as s/he trivialized my lifetime. It takes love, and passion and incredible self-denial and discipline. It also takes enough intelligence to not accept status quo answers which are wrong. As a researcher with a green personality, I search and sift through tons of information to make most decisions. Many other parents were told "buying hearing aids would fix the hearing problem." To believe this message from an audiologist or a doctor is perfectly acceptable. So if your parents made this choice, you should thank them.

 Fortunately we have the internet which is doing more for parents to find out, make choices and get going. Parenting a child with hearing problems also means financial difficulties for most parents. Once you have bought hearing aids, there is little money left for other things. A hard of hearing child who has parents in the poverty world will probably get hearing aids in their ears through someone's altruism. A middle class family gets no or limited support, and pays for the hearing aids, often using the over- stretched Visa.

The Great Debate was Raging.

Nobody in the deaf education field was spared the Great Debate. My answer was that each child had to be studied to determine the best choice for that child. I made a presentation to a government Review Team at E.C.Drury School for the Deaf in which I said that regardless of the method chosen, that all us Parents wanted a happy child who turned into a happy adult. I was the only speaker to be applauded that whole night. It is quite something to be on a stage and see Deaf applause and hearing applause at the same time. 

Hearing Aid Hyperbole

There was definite hyperbole in the expectations of what a hard of hearing child could be expected to cope with from the medical to the education systems. Hearing aids were developed for the very deaf end, had yucky sound quality, and came nowhere near reaching the speech banana. When a child was successful at language learning with one of those older hearing aids, s/her probably had a genius ability to figure out language from hearing part of the sound and extrapolating to the whole. None-the-less, the hearing aid companies advertised that their products replaced human hearing. There was little understanding of earshot, and FM's were only used at school. The FM's were ugly boxes which further marked the child as deaf. If a child had a mild hearing loss, nothing was done to help the child beyond preferred seating at school. Nobody tracked the effects socially and on language, or tracked the children to adulthood.

Moderate Hearing Loss Ignored

A child with a moderate hearing loss might have hearing aids which were expected to do the job. Many children with moderate hearing losses were allowed to only wear the hearing aids at school and to come home and put the hearing aids in a box. Nothing to hear at home???? no language, no social skills, no jokes. A child with a moderate hearing loss can cope with out  hearing aids by turning the volume up on the television until all normal hearing people in family leave in self-defense, and by having a few friends or family members with naturally loud voices. This also means that they often only hear angry voices which are raised, and they may cringe or leave in fear.

Collectivism and Research on Deaf Children

Voice for Hearing Impaired Children told the Ontario government as a group that a child with a hearing threshold under 50 dB had no special needs in the classroom. I fought this tooth and nail, in letters and phone calls, only to be told that I was an individual and had no clout while Voice was a group and therefore had clout. Voice has changed their name to Voice for Deaf Kids, and as such should have no representation or business  at SEACs or anything else. As the previous generation of experts is dying off, the needs of the hard of hearing child are now been studied, which I find very exciting. I have been there since the beginning, and there is still a lot of bull around. There is also the parent elitism of "Well, my child is completely deaf, therefore your child has no problems compared to mine."

Better Methods, Better Hearing Aids

The way it works is very simple, the more hearing a child has, the more the child hears, so the hard of hearing child hears some or all speech sounds, and lots of background noise which the deaf child never hears. The deaf child hears parts of speech and must learn to extrapolate to the whole of the message. However, the development of the cochlear implant is wonderful for two reasons, it gives speech as a choice to deaf people, and the loss of the deaf market for the hearing aid companies means they are finally looking at the needs of the hard of hearing. There is such an improvement in each hearing aid that Reid gets, that when his hearing aid is broken, he will not use his older hearing aid until the new one is fixed.

Huge Population of Hard of Hearing People

Another reason for the apparent shift in sympathy for the hard of hearing is financial. If you attempt to create a group of Deaf people, you have a limited number to call upon for fund raising. If you extend your name to include the hard of hearing, you have a vast population. With the exception of Self-Help for Hard of Hearing people, the inclusion of hard of hearing is still only vague.

What you do to a Baby Affects the Baby's Development

During Reid's childhood there was definite research indicating that a baby who signed developed more neural pathways to visual, and a baby who was exposed to spoken language developed more neural pathways to auditory. That was confirming research which went well with my basic feelings, which were all I had to go on, because it made simple sense. I have been bemused by the "baby signs" movement because while it is all very well to communicate with the baby through sign, is it going to affect the child's normal speech pathways development?

Speechreading a Normal Part of Human Communication

A crater developed between me and the other auditory verbal parents and teachers because they eliminated speech reading, which was only supposed to happen during speech lessons, to sit so the child could not see your face and lips, and force the child to work harder to hear, only during lessons. The parents saw the teachers covering their mouths to speak or work with the child, and did the same at home all day long. This struck me as ridiculous because my son could speechread perfectly. So we only covered our mouths during actual class, and the rest of he time, I made sure I faced Reid before speaking. One of the demands of the cochlear implant program was sufficient speechreading skills, and the auditory-verbal people finally came around to my way of thinking, simply because of the pressure from the CI industry.

Some Sign, Replaced by Words

We had Sesame street to teach us a little sign for survival. That was what I used when Reid was not able to hear for one reason or another. The advent of the Microlink FM has really removed the need for sign in a child's life, but there are always those moments when you need to fingerspell or engage in some private sign. Occasionally we meet Deaf people who sign, and we have no method of communicating with them except by smiling.

It is a miracle that my child can  talk just like most of the world. That miracle was possible because of the wonderful people who devoted their lives to making speech a choice for deaf and hard of hearing children.

PAM Candlish  
1 October 2003