Children, Deaf, of Deaf Parents

Deaf children with Deaf parents usually grow up in the Deaf community, that is if their parents offer them a sign language and are active members of the community. These Deaf children are similar to other children of linguistic and cultural minorities in many ways. They are also different in that they cannot, or at least not with the same ease as other minority children, acquire the majority language as a second language. These majority languages are for Deaf people always spoken languages; they are also less (or not) accessible because they cannot be heard, only seen through speechreading or written text. Due to these linguistic modality differences, the culture of the hearing majority is also often difficult to grasp in its finer details. Deaf children of Deaf parents simply by being deaf, are not raised in homogenous households in which the mother tongue is usually dominant, as opposed to their hearing peers. Deaf children of deaf parents are more likely to experience differing linguistic modality permutations in spite of sharing the same family characteristics. Nevertheless, most Deaf children grow up to be bilingual and bicultural, even if to differing degrees. Consider, the following examples.

Sara is six years old and deaf. Her parents are both Deaf and use American Sign Language (ASL) as their preferred language of communication. Her one older brother is hearing and one set of grandparents is hearing, but the other set is Deaf and she also has other Deaf relatives. She is growing up signing ASL at home, and in the school for the Deaf she is attending, using ASL alongside written English.

Her friend from very early on is Nick. He is also a deaf child of Deaf parents (DOD): Both his parents are Deaf, as are some of his other relatives, but he has a younger, hearing sister. His parents, who are active members of the local Deaf community, decided to have him implanted with a cochlear implant when he was one year old. At home Nick’s language is ASL, but his parents send him to a public school where he is taught in spoken English. He actually does not use ASL at all at school, except when signing outside class to Faye, a deaf friend.

Faye is also a DOD, but her deaf parents both had hearing parents. There are no other deaf people in her extended family. Her parents learned ASL later in life but use it as their day-to-day language at home. Since they were raised orally, they use Sign Supported English with their hearing relatives. Faye attends the same mainstream school as Nick and is supported by an ASL interpreter most of the time in class. Her spoken English is not intelligible enough for her to communicate directly and easily with her classmates. That is why she often avoids using her voice and prefers to sign, with the support of a sign language interpreter in her contacts with hearing people.

The descriptions of three children who know one another and who live close together indicate how diverse their linguistic, cultural and educational experiences are. This diversity of course is found all over [Page 114]the world. DOD children can also be in a language situation involving more than one sign language and more than one spoken language. It is thus difficult to categorize DOD as one homogenous group.

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