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 5:3
Thursday, March 20, 2003
What Has Been Your Experience?
Parents of Deaf Children Share Their Feelings About
Services They've Dealt With During the Early Years
Written by renowned scholars Kathryn Meadow-Orlans, Donna Mertens, and
Marilyn Sass-Lehrer,
Parents and
Their Deaf Children: The Early Years describes experiences of parents with
early intervention services, schools, health, and educational systems.
Parents and Their Deaf Children stems from a nationwide survey of parents
with six-to-seven-year-old deaf or hard of hearing children, followed up by
interviews with 80 parents. In the design of this project the authors explain,
“Parents of 6- and 7-year-old children were targeted for the following reasons:
(1) All children with even a mild congenital hearing loss will probably be
identified by age 6; (2) all of the children and parents would have had an
opportunity to participate in (or would have failed to receive) intervention
services; (3) a fairly narrow age span would increase the homogeneity of
parental expectations for developmental progress; and (4) parents would be close
enough in time to the infant and preschool years to provide accurate
retrospective reports and also sufficiently removed to gain some perspective on
those experiences.”
The authors not only discuss the parents’ communication choices for their
children, but also describe how parents’ experiences differ, especially for those
whose children are hard of hearing, have additional conditions, or have cochlear
implants. You can read more about the results of this distinctive study in
chapter seven, Minority Families: Wave of the Future. Also,
order Parents and
Their Deaf Children and take advantage of your exclusive subscriber
discount.
 Trying
to decide whether or not your child would benefit from a cochlear implant?
The Parents’
Guide to Cochlear Implants by Patricia M. Chute
and Mary Ellen Nevins explains in a friendly, easy-to-follow style each stage of
the process. Parents will learn about device options,
how to choose an implant center, the surgery
itself, what to expect at switch-on, cochlear
implant limitations, ways to enhance language development and learning at home,
school issues, and more. Also included are brief
stories by parents whose children have had implants that provide reassuring
actual experiences to parents considering the procedure for their own child. In
addition, the appendices offer a rich source of resources. Read about the
post-implantation stage in
chapter five
and
order
The Parents’
Guide to Cochlear Implants.
 The
upcoming
“Genetics, Disability, and Deafness”
conference, which takes place
on April 2-4, 2003, promises to be an insightful exploration on the latest
concepts in genetics as they relate to disability and deafness.
Featured keynote speakers include
Louis Menand, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
book The Metaphysical Club; Alan Guttmacher, Deputy Director, National
Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD;
and Michael Bérubé, Paterno Liberal Arts Professor in Literature, The
Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. Also,
Benjamin S. Wilfond
has been added to the program; he
will be speaking about bioethics and genetics. For
more information and to register by the extended deadline date of March 24, 2003,
go to
http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/gupiconference/index.html.
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