I Fill This Small Space: The Writings of a Deaf Activist

Cherry Blossoms Come to Bloom

122 Cherry Blossoms Come to Bloom Here, Newman uses his extensive experiences as a teacher and a father of a deaf daughter to reflect on the challenges facing parents of deaf children. He uses humor in his writings and talks to parents to further his cause, and always pushes the case for what has now become known as early intervention. Some of his writings and talks can be seen as a training guide in honesty and tact for administrators and teachers of deaf children. His philosophy can be summed up in a line that he wrote in a column in The Deaf American: “The best gift you can give your deaf child is the gift of yourself.” We were totally unprepared for our deaf daughter, Carol Lee. Already in our forties and already having brought up four other hearing children, we had enough of diapers and pabulum. Carol Lee has more than a 95% decibel hearing loss. She is now a little over three years of age and, as we gaze fondly at her, we both agree she is the most beautiful mistake we ever made. Some people cannot stop eating potato chips. We cannot stop kissing her. The greatest predicament that faces parents of deaf children is now how to help the child talk and speechread and use auditory aids. In the hands of parents is a deaf child whose mind is a veritable tabula rasa. What do they do with a deaf child without language, without the means to receive and convey thoughts in the normal way? How can their deaf child be helped to learn language and thus become tuned in and responsive to the world of the hearing? Aware that thought comes before language, that the wheels in the mind must turn so that there will be readiness for learning, we placed mobile units over our daughter’s playpen. Moving plastic birds and butter flies attract an infant’s eyes. Next came learning toys based on graduation of size and matching of different shapes. Carol would rather play with puzzles than with dolls. We had difficulty at first but finally we were permitted to enroll her in a branch of the International Montessori Schools where a large part of learning was based on non-verbal tasks. The Deaf American (July–August 1972) 123 It seems logical that a child’s mind be stimulated by non-verbal tasks as early as possible so that there will be recognition, perception, and the development of skills to perceive patterns between relationships and associations. This kind of development helps speechreading and all forms of learning. It creates the conditions for thinking and for an awareness of what people are saying and doing. A prelingual deaf child must have a symbol system that is visually oriented and that is almost tangible so that she will have a means of expressing herself, of understanding what her parents are talking about and for storing in her memory identifications of familiar objects and incidents that have occurred. It is almost impossible for a prelingual deaf child of two years of age to speak or speechread “squirrel” or “crocodile ” but it is possible to sign them or recognize the signs for them at an age earlier than two. When we changed Carol Lee’s diapers we made the signs for mommy, daddy, love, you wet? Here was gross movement and three-dimensional appearance in space that a deaf infant’s eyes will follow, will learn to distinguish , and to associate with something relevant. No other communication method in the world can equal hand signs in its richness, ingenuity, grace, and flexibility. Daily, we brought to our child a live Sesame Street. A baby has immediate needs—to be cuddled and fed and, if it can hear, to be spoken to. If the baby cannot hear, common sense dictates that we do more than just mouth words, more than just hope that the hearing aid will take care of everything. Holding our Carol near a campfire we both vocalized and signed the world for “hot.” There was no response but two weeks later, back home from a vacation trip, she put her hand on our clothes dryer and made the sign for “hot.” Input is the first stage. Parents and educators often expect immediate output or performance and if this does not occur they think they have not reached the child or have failed which, of course, is not true. After two...