Deaf News: Deafness experts in America say deaf children should be bilingual and learn sign language

Hearing experts ignored Deaf people’s views and evidence of their own bilinguals deaf children doing well in education with age-appropriate social development for many decades.

We seasoned and cynical (for good reason) campaigners and Deaf Human Rights advocates say ‘Yeah, we knew that’, it would be accompanied by slow clapping to the news.

Let us hope these news would push out further the narrow-minded boundaries imposed upon us Deafies and families of deaf children by ‘hearing experts of deafness’.

Its about time that professionals start to recognised that deaf children benefit from both oral and sign language skills. Its better for both communication and development of the deaf identity 🙂
However they are a bit slow on the uptake… We’ve been saying this for years!!

Would love to read the whole research article and not just the abstract though. I’m really interested in this subject as it supports what my gut has been telling me all along. I was advised by some professionals to not sign with my profoundly deaf child, yet encouraged to sign with him by other professionals. Getting a diagnosis that your child is deaf when he is only 4 weeks old is scary and overwhelming. I was already a parent to a hearing baby, and I thought that I had the ‘how to be a great parent thing’ in hand! I was so concerned that I wouldn’t be able to give this tiny, perfect, but different, baby everything that he needed – that I needed to learn a whole new ‘toolkit’ of parenting skills. You have to adapt what you do so much, from having to change from ‘sssshhhhing’ them to sleep, to singing to them, to communicating, not startling them when you suddenly appear in their view or touch them…. etc etc. Then to have professionals disagree with each other is so confusing, especially about something so fundamental as communication. Luckily, I had already done some baby signing with my first born, and he knew 60 signs by 14 months old, by 16 months his speech caught up with his signing so we didn’t use the signing anymore for communication much but continued to learn new signs ‘for fun’ – with an under 2 year old! I was so lucky that I had the experience that signing certainly didn’t hinder his speech, but I felt helped his understanding and communication, lowered his frustration and so massively helped his overall development and our strong relationship. My youngest son picked up signing so easily, and was signing very young. Our signing skills progressed by us having local deaf adults come to the house for an hour a week to teach us some deaf awareness and going through the signs for specific ‘child related’ topics such as bath time, feeding, play time, animals. I’m aware most people aren’t as lucky as us. When my son was 15 months he had cochlear implants, he responded at switch on and signed that he ‘heard pig’. We were in tears. Without sign he couldn’t have done that. Again some professionals told us to now stop signing or he would rely on this rather than speech. How can you take away communication from anyone, let alone a baby. It seemed cruel, and obviously we told them in no uncertain terms that we wouldn’t be stopping. 6 weeks later my son – at only 18 months – actually said ‘more, more’ more’, when he wanted some more butter on his cracker. Without sign there’s no way that he would have known what the concept was. Naturally, we dropped the specific signs when he learnt the words ‘mummy’ ‘daddy’ ‘milk’ ‘more’ etc were dropped within a few months, but if he looked confused or didn’t understand we just did the sign and said the word again. We did this by instinct as when you’re looking after a baby and a 2 year old your hands are rarely empty, so it meant we could continue to chat without having to put everything down! The implants opened up another great method of communication and we appreciate everything the implants have given him. When you’re pushing a baby in a pushchair you want to tell them about everything that you can see – it’s hard to sign when you’re pushing a pushchair up a hill for example! My son is now 5 and above age appropriate for his speech and language and definitely prefers to speak. I think that is just his preference and his individual choice. He understands sign and will use it when he thinks it is necessary – he uses it to babies a lot and also to us when he is explaining something that we’re not understanding! Very sweet and very clever! I’m aware that his individual choice could have gone the other way and he could have preferred to sign – who am I to take that choice away from him? I’m also aware that in the future he could change his mind and feel more comfortable around deaf BSL users and so prefer to use sign. At the age of 5 I feel like I have given my son the choices that I wanted to and set him in good stead for his future. I’m now finishing my BSL level 3 and still loving learning this wonderful language and continue to teach both of my boys. Sorry for long post 🙂

As an adult who attended both mainstream and (oral only) deaf school, I believe we should have been taught both BSL and oral communication. Simply because when you leave school you have choices to make which in some cases are life defining. After school you need to integrate into mainstream life, get a job, build relationships etc. If a oral deaf person struggles with the hearing world they can become isolated and alone. A oral deaf person who signs has the option to join the deaf community, something which is very hard to do because they are a very close knit group… just like the film “My song”
Having two languages can open career options also, interpreter, deaf teacher, social worker etc. I think preventing children from signing, with the intention of helping them to integrate into the hearing world prevents the child from accessing a rich and rewarding future.

Wow! The so-called professionals finally got a clue! Hooray!

It’s all very well saying that sign language should be made available to children, parents and others who want and need to be able to communicate in this language…but my own,and others experiences are that the D/deaf community are suspicious and not very welcoming to anyone who tries to enter their domain. As we know,anyone learning BSL needs just one thing to achieve their objective… practise,practise and more practise. I feel sometimes that, for a group who are always vocal about ” losing” their collective identity, they could be perhaps a little bit more thoughtful regarding newcomers, be they Deaf, deaf,hoh or even hearing because at the end of the day welcoming people in is a good way of building this identity up.

There is nothing inherently incorrect about wanting a bilingual approach to language learning. The Total Communication path is not inconsistent with an Auditory approach for CI children, but it depends on the value of the teach and what is the focus. The real question is what is the goal of the parent, not the Deaf community or the Physicians. As the parent of a pre-lingual CI child, my goal was to insure that auditory approach was first and foremost which would most naturally mimic what my wife and I did with our other children. We want to learn ASL with your son and other children, but the support from the Deaf community is simply non-existant because we chose to focus on auditory approach first. Unfortunately, all the ASL resources in our area are geared toward using ASL first and speaking and hearing second.

My friend is hard of hearing to the point where she attended the state school for the deaf. She is now 49. Her family refused to learn the first sign and forbid her to use any type of sign language at home. Essentially she lived in a vacuum until she was 5 and then for 3 months every year during vacation. At 16, she left home, moved in with a friend from school who was deaf, as were his parents. Today they have 3 beautiful HEARING children who use sign as their primary language at home and beautifully spoken English in “the world”. NOT teaching a deaf/hard of hearing child is abuse. Imagine being forbidden to communicate? Finally the rest of the world is catching on.

Why stop with Deaf children? All children/families should consider being bilingual in sign language. It has so many benefits in the earliest of childhood communication, not to mention a large majority of children learn best from visual platforms. It doesn’t have to be about “Deaf vs. Hearing”. I think a big problem is a lack of information, especially to “hearing families”. We are taught to believe that ASL is for “Deaf people”. It’s a language. A great language that everyone should know the benefits of and have access to. We need to start stopping the centuries of segregation. Knowing what I know now about ASL, I work with my own children everyday teaching them signs. My only regret was that I didn’t get to learn the language earlier in my life when it would have been easier.

We’re talking about training the brain to listen! Not ethics. Neuroplasticity!
Ethics doesn’t matter to the new neural connections that need to be created in the auditory and language centers of the brain. The only way to do that is access to sound and language! 100% listening and spoken language.
Total communication and ASL will inhibit this. Fully habilitate that brain and then learn the second language. ASL, Spanish, whatever!! The skies the limit. If you miss that window of optimal brain plasticity in early childhood, it is gone!!!!