What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know.

by John Dutton Wright.

PREFACE

The mother of a little deaf child once wrote as follows:

"As a mother of a deaf child, and one whose experience has been unusual only in that it has been more fortunate than that of the average mother so situated, I want to place before you (the teachers of the deaf) a plea for the education of the parents of little deaf children.

"While you are laboring for the education of the deaf, and for their sakes are training teachers to carry on the work, there are, in almost every home that shelters a little deaf child, blunders being made that will r.e.t.a.r.d his development and hinder your work for years to come--blunders that a little timely advice might prevent. We parents are not willfully ignorant, not always stupidly so; but that we are in most cases densely so, there can be no doubt.

"Can you for the moment put yourselves into our place? Suppose you are just the ordinary American parents, perhaps living far from the center of things. You know in a hazy way that there are deaf and blind and other afflicted people--perhaps you have seen some of them.

"Now, into your home comes disease or a sudden awakening to the meaning of existing conditions, and you find that _your_ child is _deaf_.

"At first your thought is of physicians; they fail you. Advice from friends and advertis.e.m.e.nts from quacks pour in upon you; still you find no comfort and no help.

"You stop talking to the child. What is the use? He cannot hear you! You pity him--oh, infinitely! And your pity takes the form of indulgence. You love him and you long to understand him; but you cannot interpret him and he feels the change, the helplessness in your att.i.tude toward him. You try one thing after another, floundering desperately in your effort to discover what radical step must be taken to meet this emergency. After a time you seize upon the idea that seems to you the best. Probably it is to wait until he is six or seven and then put him into an inst.i.tution. But while you wait for school age to arrive, you lose that close touch with the soul of your child which may be established only in these early years, for you have no adequate means of communication with him--no way to win his confidence. Soon the child has pa.s.sed this stage, and no school can ever give him what you might and would have given had you known how.

"You who are trained teachers of the deaf can hardly realize the need of advice about matters perfectly obvious to YOU; but the need exists. May I tell you from my own experience a few of the things about which you might advise--you, who know!

"In the first place, suggest to parents that they make simple tests of their children's hearing; and tell them how and why those who are _partially_ deaf should be helped.

"Then tell them to talk, and talk, and talk, to their little deaf ones--to say everything and say it naturally. And tell them some things in particular that should be said--commands, etc., and _certainly_ 'I love you.' Tell them to speak in whole sentences.

Give them an idea of the possibilities of lip-reading.

"Tell them that _by the expression of the face_ they may convey to the deaf child the interest, approval, disapproval, etc., that they would express to a hearing child in the tone of voice.

"Tell them that there is _rarely_ an untrained person who can _safely_ meddle with articulation.

"Tell them that it is not true that all deaf children are bad; that the deaf must learn obedience as others do.

"Tell them the many things which you wish your pupils had learned before they entered school.

"Only this I beg of you--tell them!

"LUCILE M. MOORE."

For the sake of presenting the ideas contained in this little book in a somewhat systematic manner it was best to arrange them on the supposition that they would come to the notice of the mothers while their children were yet less than two years of age. In many cases, however, this will not be the case. When, therefore, the child is three, four, or five years old when this falls into the hands of the mother, it would still be well if she carried out the suggestions in the order in which they are here arranged. With the maturity of mind and body that comes with the added years, the child can pa.s.s through the earlier stages of the training much more rapidly than can be the case with the baby. Nevertheless, the preliminary steps should not be omitted. A child of four can be carried in six months through the exercises that occupied two years when begun with the child of twelve months, but the older child should not be started with exercises suggested for the years after two.

Mothers of deaf children cannot be expected to be trained teachers of the deaf. It would be useless, and, in fact, often unfortunate, to ask them to attempt to teach articulation to their children. Even for them to teach the children to write would usually be undesirable because the greatest gain from the mother's efforts comes from the early establishment of the speech-reading habit and _entire_ dependence upon it. It is a very great help to have this habit fixed before writing is taught. There is no haste about the child's learning to write. That is easily and quickly accomplished when the proper time comes. The difficult thing to do is, very fortunately, the thing the mother is best fitted to accomplish, namely, to create in the child the ability to interpret speech by means of the eye, and the habit of expecting to get ideas by watching the face of a speaker.

With these ideas in mind there has been careful avoidance in this little book of any suggestion that the mother should be anxious about the speech development of the child before five years of age. If she has the patience and the time to follow the directions given, she will have done her child a very great service; the greatest that lies within her power; and she will have laid the foundation for a more rapid and better development of speech than would have been possible without her preliminary training.

Not every mother will find it possible to carry out all the suggestions offered in this little book, but no one should feel discouraged on that account. It seemed best to offer too many suggestions rather than too few, because these pages may fall into the hands of some mothers whose situation is such that full advantage can be taken of every idea here given. Presence of too much matter in the little book will not destroy its usefulness in cases where only a portion can be applied, whereas the lack of some of the ideas might limit its value in certain instances.

No one should give up in despair just because it is not possible to do all that is here suggested. Something, at least, can be found here which it is possible to do that will help very much.

Sometimes, through a false sense of shame, or through ignorance of the possibilities open to a deaf child, mothers have refused to admit that their children were deaf, or to allow anything to be done for them, until very valuable time has been lost. This is unfair to the child, and very wrong. A mother should have only pity for the deaf child and eagerness to aid him to overcome his handicap so far as possible. Delay in frankly facing the facts and in taking all possible measures to develop the remaining faculties will in the end only increase the mother's shame and add to it the pangs of remorse.

In a little book written to guide physicians in advising parents of deaf children, I said:

"The situation of a deaf child differs very much, from an educational standpoint, from that of the little hearing child. Two hours a day playing educational games in a kindergarten is as much as is usually given, or is needful, for the little hearing child up to six or seven years of age; and his mental development and success in after life will not be seriously endangered if even that is omitted and he does not begin to go to school until he is eight or nine. The hearing child of eight who has never been in school and cannot read or write has, nevertheless, without conscious effort, mastered the two most important educational tasks in life. He has learned to speak and has acquired the greater part of his working vocabulary. In other words, although he has never been across the threshold of a school, his education is well advanced for his years and mental development.

"The situation of the uninstructed deaf child of eight is very different. The task which it has taken the hearing child eight years to accomplish, the deaf child of eight has not even begun. He cannot speak a word; he does not even know that there is such a thing as a word. He is eight years behind his hearing brother, and even if he starts now, unless some means can be found for aiding him to overtake his brother educationally, he will be only eight years old in education when he is sixteen years of age. And when he is sixteen, the psychological period will have pa.s.sed for acquiring what he should have learned when he was eight. The fact that the child is deaf does not exempt him from the inexorable laws of mental psychology and heredity. In the development of the human mind there is a certain period when all conditions are favorable for the acquisition of speech and language. Unnumbered generations of ancestors acquired speech and language at that stage of their mental development, and this little deaf descendant's mind obeys the law of inherited tendencies.

"If the speech and language-learning period, from two years of age to ten, is allowed to pa.s.s unimproved, the task of learning them later is rendered unnecessarily difficult.

"Therefore, in the case of the little deaf child, the years from two to ten are crucial, and of far greater importance than the same period in the case of the hearing child."

Even though the child be totally deaf from birth, he can nevertheless be taught to speak and to understand when others speak to him. He can be given the same education that he would be capable of mastering if he could hear. The mother need not be despairing nor heart-broken. A prompt, brave, and intelligent facing of the situation will result in making the child one to be proud of and to lean upon.

JOHN D. WRIGHT.

1 Mount Morris Park, West, New York City.

February, 1915.

WHAT THE MOTHER OF A DEAF CHILD OUGHT TO KNOW

(_Mothers are strongly advised to read the Preface_)

I

FACING THE FACTS

While deafness is a serious misfortune, it is neither a sin, nor a disgrace, to be ashamed of. It is a handicap, to be sure, but one to be bravely and cheerfully faced, for it does not destroy the chances for happiness and success. It is cause for neither discouragement nor despair. It will demand patient devotion and courageous effort to overcome the disadvantage, but what mother is not willing to show these in large measure for her child when the future holds a.s.surance of comfort and usefulness?

The earlier that the facts are known and squarely faced, the better. It is always wiser in life to prepare for the worst and gratefully accept the best, than to refuse to acknowledge the possibility of the worst until it is too late to remedy it, or at least to reduce it to its lowest terms.

When a mother first suspects that her child's hearing is not perfectly normal, what should she do? Of course, first of all, the best available ear specialist should be consulted at once in order to determine whether the cause can be removed and normal hearing restored. Sometimes, however, the specialists are uncertain of the outcome, and sometimes their hopes are not realized. In the meantime, precious days and weeks are pa.s.sing in which something could be done for the little one educationally, without in any way interfering with the medical efforts at relief. The two things can be, and should be, carried on simultaneously. If normal hearing is restored no harm has been done by the educational training; in fact, the development of the child has been advanced. On the other hand, if the hopes that were entertained are disappointed, then precious and irrecoverable time has not been lost.

The t.i.tle presupposes that the mother has already accepted the fact that her child's hearing is not perfect, and, for the sake of the child, it is to be hoped that this knowledge came to her very promptly after the occurrence of the deafness.

One would naturally expect a mother, of her own accord, to carefully test all the senses of her child by many simple and repeated exercises during the first few months of its life. The many cases, however, in which deafness on the part of a child has not been recognized, or at least not acknowledged, by the mother till the third, fourth, or even fifth year, show a strange neglect of a highly desirable investigation, and a natural unwillingness to accept a truth, the possibility of which must certainly have occurred to her long before.

If she could only realize that she need not feel downcast and heavy-hearted by reason of her little one's imperfect hearing; if she could only know that she need not look forward to a life for him different from that of other children; if she could understand that training and education can enable him to overcome to an extraordinary degree the disadvantage of deafness, she would set about the task with cheerfulness and hope, and if she knew that the sooner she began, the better it would be for the little one, she would not stubbornly refuse for so long to acknowledge even the possibility of deafness.