As Deaf Parents Raising our kids - Pt. 1

Being Deaf Parents….. Hearing Kids

H and I’ve always wanted to have children. We knew we will have hearing children. For several reasons, donor is hearing and I come from a hearing family. Most of my relatives are hard of hearing but that doesn’t weight much of having deaf children.

H and I knew we will face some challenging. The most challenging that we had faced were – our kids’ peers’ parents and my child’s teacher. Some of those issues had solved. (Will discuss more later on)

Raising our hearing children weren’t so difficult. We have a device that helped us a lot which is baby cry signal. When a baby cry – that device send to light flashing to let us know that baby is crying. We might be in trouble if power went off. It does happen to us several times. What we did, we took our daughter, M to sleep with us. She will move and "tap" our body to wake us up. Our son, K has been sleep with me in same bed (rarely use baby cry signal). He will hit (not hard-whew) you until you wake.

I believe that we probably raise our kids just like most of you raise your own children. I’m trying to figure out what difference between hearing families and deaf families with hearing children. Probably the communication part. We use American Sign Language (ASL).

H and I strongly believe that our children must know how to use american sign language and be able to communicate with us fluency. It’s our primary communication mode. We are glad that our children have the able to use ASL and speaking English.

Often people stopped by and asked us – Are your kids deaf? We always tell them – no, they are hearing. They were so shocked to see them signing so young. ***In my mind, Hello!!! You started speaking so young too! Ha ha… Some people are sometime – ignorant! But again, sometime they didn’t know… ***

H and I wanted our kids to grow as normal kids as other. We put them into different kind of activities with other peers (hearing peers, kodas, deaf peers). I've faced some challenging myself - for example... neighbor kids were playing outside. Their mothers were chatting. I came out and they waved. That was it! I want to be part of group and chatting with them. I often watched my kids playing or doing my yardworks. I would like to know what's going on with the community or what they are talking about. I'm not going to stop my kids from playing with their kids just because of their mothers. Next door, N was nice enough to make effort to communcate with us. Have to applause for her effort but I do wish that she could do more.

I better go back to my scrapbooking. I will come back and discuss more about some issues/stories.

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