The Deaf Way: Perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture

Experiences of a Deaf Mother and Preschool Teacher

Experu/Y/us ifa rnq:if-Mother andyreschoo~ TeacMr RITVA BERGMANN n Denmark, all families with deaf children are entitled to parent guidance from the schools for the deaf, the audiology centers and the Children's Clinic in Copenhagen. Most parents of deaf children are hearing, and all parent counselors are also hearing. There are no deaf parent counselors in our countryyet . I experienced parent guidance twelve years ago. Perhaps you will wonder if it is necessary to give parent guidance to deaf parents of deaf children: Deaf people know everything about deafness. We know what it is like to be deaf. We master sign language, and we don't have any communication problems. You can compare deaf parents and their deaf children with hearing parents and their hearing children; neither group needs support or parent guidance, because their children are normal. But is this always true? No-you cannot say for certain. We must remember that hearing parents normally have excellent sources of information on childbearing and children-contacts with people, workshops and courses, prenatal classes, TV, radio, books, and so on-that may not be available to deaf parents. Our hearing parent counselor felt that it was unnecessary to guide us, not only because we are deaf, but also because we are teachers. As teachers, we often give hearing parents guidance and information about deafness, so what could a parent counselor tell us that we didn't already know? But we were new parents; and just as many other parents, we had thousands of questions. We were uncertain of what to do. There is a big difference between being a professional and being a parent. We needed to talk with professionals, but unfortunately we became the professionals in this situation instead of being the parents. We had to guide our child's daycare center. We gave the teaching assistant sign language lessons and information about how to stimulate language development. We did it for free, because we wanted our child to be happy and able to communicate with someone in sign language. We gave and gave, but what about ourselves? We really needed guidance, but we got none. Since most deaf children have hearing parents, the parent guidance program was developed and designed for hearing parents who know nothing about deafness and sign language. The parent counselors have programs of standard questions to ask during visits with hearing families with deaf children. These questions might include: Can your child hear when you are vacuum-cleaning? Does your child use his or her voice? Does your child benefit from his or her hearing aid? How on earth can we-deaf parentsanswer such questions? The parent counselor suggested that I borrow different musical instruments so our deaf child would experience different sounds, learn to differentiate them, benefit more Experiences of a Deaf Mother and Preschool Teacher from his hearing aid, and so on. Well, I thought, now we must have music in our deaf home. Now we must be like other families. No normal family life without music! Through this kind of parent guidance, we deaf parents would come to feel that we are not good enough. Maybe we are good examples of the failure of the education of the deaf. Our children should not be as we were. They must learn to speak better, to read and write better, to have more knowledge, to be more integrated in the hearing community, and so on. One day my husband proudly told our parent counselor that our daughter, at the age of almost nine months, had signed BATH. She asked, "Can your daughter pronounce the word 'bath?'" My husband became frustrated, because it was more important to her that our daughter be able to speak. When I proudly said that our child, at the age of twenty months, had mastered 170 different signs, the counselor asked me, "How many words can your child pronounce ?" I also became frustrated with the fact that she was more interested in words than in signs. The parent counselor showed a picture of a dog and to check if our son could sign DOG. But our son, at the age of two, had known what a dog was for several months. He was now very interested in knowing the different breeds of dogs, and of course he signed POODLE. The counselor didn't know the sign for poodle and said, "No, it's not BATH; It's DOG." (The sign POODLE is similar to BATH.) She...