Maternal Distancing Strategies Toward Twin Sons, One With Mild Hearing Loss: A Case Study

The authors apply descriptive and sequential analyses to a mother's distancing strategies toward her 3-year-old twin sons in puzzle assembly and book reading tasks. One boy had normal hearing and the other a mild hearing loss (threshold: 30 dB). The results show that the mother used more distancing behaviors with the son with a hearing loss, and thus gave greater encouragement to this son's cognitive development. These results differ from those of previous studies of deaf or hard of hearing children, whose participants generally had severe or profound hearing loss. In those studies, parents of deaf children used more low-level distancing than parents of normally hearing children. The results of the present study are discussed in terms of their implications for the parenting of twins and of children with mild hearing loss.