This would be a place where I would feel comfortable allowing my daughter to interact without fear of her being “flamed” by anyone else who doesn’t like the implant. I know the majority of ASL Deaf would never do that, but there are a few that would. Those few interactions can ruin a relationship very quickly.

My oldest son is a candidate for the implant and we’ve sat down to talk with him about it. Even though he is profoundly deaf without his hearing aids, he gets pretty good use out of them. He can’t use the phone by auditory means alone. Right now, he doesn’t want to pursue the implant but he hasn’t ruled it out in the future either. We’ve supported him on this. If the day comes when he says “I want an implant,” we’ll do that. He has several friends with implants and he hangs out with them on a regular basis. He also has friends who use ASL, some who sim-com and one who cues.

Also, it’s not true that there aren’t easily accessible ASL resources out there. As a parents who gave birth to deaf children, I ran into it constantly. There were continual assumptions by all sorts of people that we would use sign language. We had to seek out alternatives. The typical educational setting, the average deaf school, the ordinary TOD… they all encourage ASL because they simply don’t know the potential of the cochlear implant. Fortunately, we ran into people whose kids we could meet and see talking and listening. And we chose the method that they had used so that we could use our own language with our kids and allow them to speak with our family and friends. Now we’ve seen the results– our kids have mastered English easily well before they entered preschool.

It is not discrimination to say that some people have poor grammar. It is a verifiable statement. It’s not ridicule. Parents know that our kids have to be able to function in many places where English skills are crucial, such as the workplace and higher education. If they CAN learn English easily, we have no reason to teach a foreign language to them first. Some day they can choose to learn a foreign language, spoken or otherwise. I wish all deaf adults had great English skills, and would not wish ill upon anyone. It would make their lives easier, and I’m sorry that it wasn’t easier for them, years ago. But today’s implanted child is not being forced to learn English, they simply learn it like any other child, by listening and imitating their parents.

Discrimination!!!

I agree that the key is parental & family involvement, and success with an implant is neither easy nor overnight. It takes perserverance and patience. One of the more difficult goals as a parent is to guide your adolescent into self-advocacy, and let go!

At some point, Kevin may become interested in writing or speaking about his success with the CI, but for now, he is just too busy being a teenager: tournament fishing, keeping stats for his HS basketball team and driving. One of his latest interests is football and basketball commentary/broadcasting.

My attitude is live and let live, but the implant has provided my son a life in the hearing world and quite a journey for our family.

He is now looking over my shoulder and states “The hearing world? There IS no other world.” There is no other world to him anyway!

Everybody, look at Michele’s comment (#17) and ponder the implications of it!

I have to emphasize that not all ASL users have poor English skills. Some of them have poor English because they spent a lot of time in speech training while growing up and missed out a lot on education and they learned ASL at a later time. Hearing parents need to be informed of this as well as it is a misconception that ASL creates poor English skills.

So many hearing parents feel that they need to implant their deaf child so that they can fit in the peer groups. I have had a few deaf children come up to me and ask me why they didn’t get CI simply because their friends have it. CI seems to be a fashion fad these days, I guess.

When I was growing up, we used to have fancy hearing aid holders (if you grew up in the 1960’s, you know what I mean), one of the hearing parent of a deaf child could design things on the leather hearing aid holder for the deaf child, many hearing parents would line up to place orders so that he could design a custom hearing aid holder with the child’s name on it, thus it became a competition thing, of course he made a lot of money and was smart enough to set up a home-based business doing that kind of thing.