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The New York Times
By TINA DONVITO

A long-simmering controversy erupted this spring over how deaf children should communicate.

It started when The Washington Post ran a story on Nyle DiMarco, the deaf “Dancing With the Stars contestant who is also an advocate for American Sign Language (ASL). When Meredith Sugar, president of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, retorted that ASL was becoming obsolete in light of better hearing aid and cochlear implant technology, the arguing went public. But that debate was really just the latest manifestation of a longstanding conflict among deaf people and parents of deaf children: Should children be fitted for hearing aids and taught to speak, or should they use sign language? Or a combination of both?

As the parent of a 2-year-old whose hearing loss was recently diagnosed, the arguments only heightened my anxiety about how to address my son Sam’s needs.

Read more  . . . Parents of Deaf Children

 

 

the guardian - Health Opinion
March 24, 2016
By Belinda Barnet

The deaf community doesn’t see deafness as pathology in need of a cure which, as an Australian mother writes, creates a terrible conflict for parents wanting to ‘fix’ a child

Laura’s first word wasn’t “mama” or “dada” – it was “up”. I couldn’t believe my ear at first (I’m profoundly deaf on one side). Our baby, implanted with cochlear implants at 11 months old, was now talking. That first word came at 15 months. I’d spent the last 14 months crouched on the carpet trying to coax any sound at all to issue from her lips.

Like a spectre of the future, this first word predicted her language trajectory over the next year: her vocabulary exploded to over 400 words by the age of two. She is now three, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, with an annoying tendency to sing Disney songs when I’m on the freeway. Her language is “in normal range” – this means she speaks as any other hearing three year old might speak.

It also means I can stop and reflect on what just happened. I don’t think I breathed for the first two years of her life; it was a blur of medical appointments, bad news, waiting rooms, “auditory brainstem response” caps larded with electrodes, and more bad news.

Then there is the conflict that ate away at me for months: was this cherubic little person “disabled”? If so, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to “fix” her.

Read more . . . 'disabled'?