Don’t Use Their Hearing Disability Just To Know ‘Mama.’
By Ronald Kennedy
March 10, 2023
What most impresses a single, female parent with a child suffering from hearing loss? Someone who cares about her kid. It shows that you are a sensitive, caring, and well-intention man. So you try to include them in your plans. Bring them along. Bring them gifts. Why not? You probably like them – you’re not faking it. It seems harmless enough. But it’s not.
As a man, your focus is “how can I get to know your child?” using this as an excuse to know ‘mama.’ Getting someone’s children involved in a courtship is a powerful sales technique.
All-in-all, it isn’t fair to the kids and isn’t fair to the parent. Involving her children suggests that you must be thinking long-term. The kids start to count on you. But you’re not ready to think long-term.
Right now, you need to be working on this relationship one day at a time. Besides, you know how this kind of pressure makes you feel: trapped.
If you’re not absolutely certain that you will be there for these kids way down the road, this level of involvement is totally inappropriate right now.
The dude must keep in mind: You’re NOT a parent or stepparent and you’re not their best friend.
Later perhaps. But not now. What these children need is someone who is sensitive to their emotional needs and boundaries.
This means, for now, you need to keep your distance! Step back! Analyze the ‘whole picture.’ Don’t move too quickly!
From Darkness To Baby Signing Enlightens
Our understanding of the way that hearing impaired children interact with the world – essentially our view of their cognitive functioning – has always influenced the way that people think they should be educated, regardless of whether that understanding was accurate.
It would be beneficial to families to first look into the Social Security programs offered. They offer programs that would help in regard to baby signing and working with a certified and qualified sign language interpreter.
They are committed to communicating effectively with the public, which includes providing meaningful access to all SSA activities, programs, facilities, and services to persons who are deaf, hard of hearing or have some form of hearing loss.
The aforementioned situation has had a great influence on disabled learners for centuries, but there are two issues of particular relevance to parents and teachers today.
One is that there are some non-hearing adults who view their educational histories, including their ‘parents and teachers’ obsessions with spoken language, as a form of oppression, if not abuse.
It’s easy to do for a deaf child to learn sign language. This is great when one speak on a communicative standpoint.
As often as not, however, the people who voice such views are people with good hearing rather than non-hearing people, or hearing impaired people talking about the lives of others rather than their own learning abilities.
It is difficult to convince such individuals that most parents and teachers have always done their best to educate hearing impaired children, but that society has long been ignorant about the potential of children with any disability – not just those who can’t hear. 
The second consequence of the cognition – education linkage is that as our understanding of cognitive psychology and cognitive development has grown, the education of these children has become more evidence based (shown by research to be effective) and tailored to their strengths and needs.
Within the field of psychology, the shift away from viewing children’s knowledge as essentially the same as that of pigeons and rats did not occur until the late 1960’s.
That change from an emphasis on external behavior (referred to as behaviorism) to an emphasis on what goes on in the mind (cognitive psychology) was occurring at the same time that we were thinking that the gestural systems used by deaf individuals in the United States and elsewhere were really language.
Both shifts reflected changes in society and science consistent with the times, and it will be worth briefly considering the intertwining of psychology and deaf education that brought us to where we are today -that led to the writing of this article.
The historical connection between views of deaf children’s cognitive abilities and their understanding can be seen as involving three or four historical stages.
The first stage, which has been referred to as the hearing impaired as inferior, resulted from work in the early 1900’s that seemed to show that non-hearing children were not as intelligent as their hearing peers.
It was during this time that psychologist studying intelligence first developed nonverbal intelligence test precisely so that they could measure the intelligence of these children.
We understand today that much of that research was influenced by the research (and society’s) belief that spoken language was an essential component of human intelligence.
Nevertheless, some of their findings, like disabled children’s difficulty in remembering sequences of items that are not meaningfully connected and children communicating in sign language, are still obtained. Today, however, we have a much better understanding of what those results really mean.
The second stage in thinking about cognition and knowledge among non-hearing children has been labeled the deaf as concrete.
From the 1940’s to the early 1960’s, research on disabled children’s hearing, problem-solving and literacy skills was interpreted to indicate that they were doomed to be concrete and literal, living in the here and now, with little ability for abstract thinking.
And the time, most psychologist believed that deaf people who did not speak did not have any language, and they failed to recognize that it was the way that we were teaching hearing impaired children and limiting their early experience – and not their hearing loss – that was responsible for many of the research findings and observed academic limitations.
That’s why dealing with the hearing impaired is no longer seen as being less capable of abstract thought than hearing children, teaching continue to struggle with non-hearing children’s tendencies to behave in apparently concrete ways in academic and social situations.
It was not until the 1970’s that psychologist and educators arrived at the point that is referred to the deaf as intellectually normal. Armed with the new cognitive psychology and a refined understanding of intelligence, researchers began to examine relations among cognition, language, and knowledge in the hearing impaired and hearing children.
Rather than seeing these children as lacking something, they finally recognized the influence of hearing impaired children’s early language and social experiences on their development and showed that, in terms of intelligence, they were quite normal.
We now know that hard-of-hearing children are just as capable of superior knowledge as are their hearing peers, and that hearing loss does not result in any insurmountable educational barriers.
In essence, people have come to accept that difference does not mean deficiency – the newest stage in understandings of the cognition-linkage in hearing impaired children.
The hard-of-hearing and hearing learners may vary in their approaches to various task, differ in their means of communication, and have different knowledge organized in different ways without such differences being good or bad.
This perspective has led us to examine differences between non hearing and hearing students as a way to better understand the intellectual development of deaf children and optimize their experiences in educational settings. It’s also amazing how toddlers get ear infections faster than others in certain school settings.
It is with that perspective that we now examine mind skills and commemoration in deaf children. But before I go on, let me point out that mind skills are different from mind absorption, although both are a part of the same whole.
Gaining understanding is the acquisition of new knowledge, whereas commemoration refers to the storage and retrieval of knowledge.
Being ‘superior by study’ is used broadly here to mean information not only about things and ideas but also skills, such as how to type or ride a bicycle, and extremely complex skills like reading.
Listening & Learning: Our Two Greatest Factors
The main question generally raised among parents is, “How will deafness affect my child’s ability regarding a deeper understanding?
The key here is to understand the foundations of this in terms of the knowledge and skills that non hearing children bring regarding mind context and how parents and teachers teach children to utilize their skills.
That is, what do hearing impaired children need to have in order to take advantage of educational opportunities and interventions, and how can we tailor our instructional methods to support them?
The society for research in child development could provide more additional information to help with those opportunities.
In seeking answers to these questions, parents and teachers often ask how non-hearing kids seeking knowledge compare to hearing ones.
Some people in our field believe that this is an inappropriate question.
We should instead focus on deaf kid’s strengths and perhaps differences among the deaf as a function of language skills, school placement, parental hearing status, and so on.
Such an approach might make sense if we were dealing with children alone.
But in a world where most deaf children have to compete in mainstream classrooms, it is essential that we understand ways in which their understanding, knowledge, and educationally relevant skills differ from the hearing children who will sit beside them.
Visual Skills
Babies born with less than normal hearing quickly learn to pay attention to the visual world: looking at facial movements of their caregivers, their gestures, and where they are looking- perhaps even before their caregiver realize the baby is can’t hear.
Although it is unclear exactly how that precedes, their learning skills (and the parts of their brains that deal with vision) consequently will develop somewhat differently than hearing babies for whom sights and sounds are usually connected.
Some scientist and practitioners claim that an emphasis on the visuals for babies with reduced hearing sensitivity might hinder their auditory skills.
Consistent with this view, auditory – verbal approaches to speech therapy, often include covering the speaker’s mouth so hard-of-hearing children have to learn to rely entirely on whatever hearing they have.
Being hard-of-hearing leads to children attending more to the visual periphery, therefore widening their knowledge of the visual field. This adaptation is important because it makes them more visually aware of what is happening around them.
Auditory Skills
Most of the research involving auditory skills among hearing impaired children is relatively recent, focusing on those with cochlear implants. While hearing aids and implants can help children hear better, children who use them still have to rely more on vision than do their hearing peers.
For them, visual and auditory skills can work together, providing mutually supporting or redundant sources of information. Auditory information can help them speech-read, draw their attention to visual information in the environment, and provide additional information about people and things.
With that said, this could mean that simultaneous communication would be beneficial for children with cochlear implants, but the issue has not yet been explored in any depth.
A variety of studies regarding the role of an audiologist and its position, along with the auditory and memory functions among children with cochlear implants has been conducted. Comparing them to hearing children, that research has not included deaf children who do not utilize implants, so it is difficult to draw any conclusions about deaf children in general.
Nevertheless, children with cochlear implants typically show shorter thought spans for auditory information because of speed of their internal speed (involved in memory rehearsal), like their external speech, is slower than that of hearing children.
Measuring (School) Skills
In some schools, such as the Better Hearing Institute, hearing impaired children’s learning, like hearing children’s learning, is usually evaluated in terms of the grades they receive on test, classroom work, and projects, as well as in overall yearly grades.
Assessment of children’s achievement, in contrast, typically relies on standardized test.
A variety of studies during the 1970’s reported that hearing impaired children with deaf parents scored higher on achievement test than did deaf children with hearing parents (even if they still lag behind hearing children).
Many people have concluded that such advantages were the result of early access to sign language, but that now appears not to be the case.
In regard to reading, parents who are able to provide their deaf children with effective access to through-the-air communication – signed or spoken – and to written language have children who are the best readers.
Great Memories If Nothing Else
Deaf and hearing children can often remember things equally, even though they differ in how they process new knowledge store it, and find it again.
In other cases, deaf and hearing children may remember the same amount of information but differ in which information they remember from something they have seen.
We thus see again that the ways in which non-hearing children learn may not be the same as the ways hearing children learn.
Thoughts of the mind typically is described in terms of two components, short & long term thinking.
If you stop and think about one of your elementary school teachers, you will be retrieving that information from your memory bank and putting it into the ‘working‘ portion, or ‘work-space‘ where thinking goes on.
Long-term memory, then, is where you keep all of your thoughts, knowledge and skills. Short-term memory is where you have information that you are paying attention to right now.
New information has gone through the short-term memory part of your brain. Sometimes it gets there, and sometimes it doesn’t.
In Conclusion
Children and adults who are fluent in a signed language have been shown to have better visual-spatial memory, regardless of whether they are deaf or hearing.
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