I have yet to meet a profoundly hoh of hearing person that speakes JUST like a hearing person. While they may be able to speak well and with perfect grammer there is still something different about their speech
Umm so? I've met a couple of severe to profound people who only wear aids and have pretty good speech (don't sound "deaf) Actually I'm only Hoh but I have VERY "deaf" sounding speech. There are also loads and loads of implantees who still have very "deaf" sounding voices.
I would like to add that #1 my son had no benefit from hearing aids. He is very profoundly deaf and has been retested on his other ear and the results have remained the same.
Good....excellent! I am NOT against implants for little kids who really don't get all that much benfit from hearing aids. I am simply against implants for ambigous cases, where the kid can hear pretty well with aids, but might experiance improved hearing with CI. I have to say it really does amaze me that some folks like Curtis Pride are oral sucesses with only 5% hearing (with hearing aids), but people with better hearing aren't oral sucesses.
#2 a baby that gets a CI at 12 months old requires far less therapy and training than a child that gets implanted at 7,8,9,10 years old. A baby that gets implanted at a very young age essentially developes language naturally. My son goes to the audiologist once every six months and has speech therapy 3 hours out of the week. As a matter of fact his speech therapy sessions involve playing, crafts, baking, and all sorts of fun things. He loves going. He has not missed out on one thing that my hearing son was able to do at his age.
True, but on the other hand, it still is therapy. Right now the speech therapy is fun b/c he's still learning language. Language therapy can be a lot of fun. Speech therapy is boring and pointless (what I mean by speech, is articulation, enuciation, and montioring things like pitch and volumne) Wait til he gets a little older. I'm still kind of skeptical about the claim that early implantation translates into nautral language aquastion.
Sure, there are superstars who have little to no language delays, but even lots of early implantees still have signifcent spoken language issues (simlair to those seen in hoh kids) Way back when,(back in sixties or fifties) there was even a profoundly deaf kid who could speak seven languages! Oralists paraded this person as "proof" that oralism worked and that most dhh could learn how to speak, Yet most deaf kids (back then and even til recently) still had significent spoken language issues. Even today oral kids still have significent grammer and syntax issues (eg saying" How many spiders have legs," instead of "How many legs do spiders have?") There are also still kids who are oral, but who have significent expressive language delay,(they still only have a handful of words) who were implanted early and given a language rich enviroment.
As far as him being teased. I am not naive to the fact that children can be cruel, but I don'e see him being teased or looked down upon any more than a deaf child that cannot speak .
Oh I don't know. I grew up oral and got teased up the wazoo about my voice (I am still very sensative about it even thou a lot of people say it sounds pretty good) and my self-esteem suffered a lot b/c of it.(was mainstreamed with little to no exposure to other dhh folks) I am very glad that I can hear and talk....I just wish that
I'd also had exposure to ASL and deaf culture too. Lots of hearing kids want to learn ASL.(you have NO idea how popular I am b/c everyone wants to learn ASL!) Please don't fall into the trap of thinking that b/c your son can hear and talk relatively well, he doesn't need ASL. Sign can serve as a clarifier when someone doesn't understand what your son said, or when he doesn't understand what someone said. It can also help when the CI is off or malfunctioning.
Give your son all the choices possible. Ensure that he can function in the hearing world, and in the deaf-world too.
