When kids can hear but parents can’t…
More than 90% of deaf parents have hearing children – and both parents and kids have to work to bridge the gap between the hearing and deaf worlds.
Parenting a hearing child when you yourself are deaf, and being the hearing child of a deaf parent, can be an enriching experience that brings parents and their children into contact with the language and culture of these two separate worlds, and children raised in these circumstances often are more mature, with a better sense of responsibility and a better ability to empathize with others.
However, communication can be a big issue for deaf parents with hearing children. It may not necessarily be a problem when children are younger, but as they grow and become more independent, discipline issues arise. And while young children perceive growing up with deaf parents to be very normal, as they reach school age they may become more aware of the fact that their family life – and parents – are different from their friends’ situation.
When Supernanny Jo Frost visited the Baulisch family she was faced with a cycle of disrupted communication. The result was that the emotional attachment between parents and children had broken down. The Baulisch children reacted to the breakdown of the parent-child bond by acting up, and mom Dorothy and dad Kip felt disempowered to step in and exert discipline.
One of the cornerstones of parenting is the flow of information between parent and child but this can be limited if either parents or their children are deaf, especially if families with both deaf and hearing members don’t have a system of communicating with each other. American Sign Language (ASL) is the standard form of communication for the deaf, but parents often find themselves using different signs or using fragmented speech to communicate with their children. This is what Dorothy had fallen into the habit of doing with her three youngest children, Jessica, 8, Jennifer, 6, and Kristin, 5. But in order to learn ASL, kids have to see it in operation so if their parents aren’t using it properly they may not pick it up.
Parents often don’t use it because they may think they shouldn’t talk to their hearing child this way – and because they don’t want to rely on their child as the interpreter. Ineffective communication was a big problem for the Baulisch family because while big sister Melissa, 18, knew how to sign, the younger kids didn’t. This meant that mom and dad were forced to rely on Melissa to interpret for them and her siblings. The fact that she was the link between her mom and dad and the other children was putting her under pressure to deal with situations that she was really too young to handle.
Another problem for hearing children with deaf parents is that their peers may feel awkward socializing with their deaf family members. Children of deaf parents often report feeling socially isolated from other children their age and often aren’t able to talk to their parents about it because they don’t want to hurt their feelings. Older children also may feel responsible for their parents’ safety and grow up believing they need to be the ones listening out for suspicious noises in the dark, fire alarms. It can all add up to a sort of ‘role reversal’ that can end up resulting in a power struggle during the teenage years.