Mentors and Role Models

Mentors and role models provide children with a person they can identify with, look up to, and emulate. Because human beings are inherently social creatures who develop their sense of self through interactions with others, having a mentor or a role model can help children begin to learn more about who they are. Mentoring and role modeling also help children develop and emulate the values and morals of their home and community and learn about their culture. For deaf children, this is especially crucial, as there are unique experiences involved in growing up deaf that cannot be shared with hearing children, especially in a world that views deafness as a medical condition rather than a cultural one. While deaf children progress through the same stages of development as hearing children do, they experience life differently than their hearing peers due to their deafness.

It is estimated that there are at least 30 million deaf people in the United States. Despite this large number, 9 out of 10 deaf children are born to hearing parents. Very few deaf children have Deaf [Page 691]parents. While Deaf children of hearing parents develop a sense of family identity, their sense of belonging to a larger community is likely to underdeveloped. This is especially true for deaf children who do not have the opportunity to meet or seek out Deaf mentors and role models. There are numerous accounts in Deaf literature of deaf children who believed that they would become hearing when they grew up because of the absence of Deaf adults in their lives. Deaf children learn about the Deaf community—a community of people that is not defined by any physical boundaries (i.e., neighborhoods, schools, workplace, etc.), but instead is defined as a cultural group that shares similar values, beliefs, and experiences and uses American Sign Language (ASL) as a common language—only by interacting with other Deaf people.

This has severe implications for children’s socioemotional development in terms of how they may come to view themselves as deaf people, because hearing adults are not likely to be knowledgeable about deafness as a cultural construct rather than a medical limitation. Oftentimes when hearing parents learn that their child is deaf, they receive misleading, unfounded, and outdated advice from those in the medical and educational settings that seeks to portray being deaf as an abnormality that needs to be corrected. Auditory amplification is frequently recommended to help make the deaf child be more like a hearing child, and the parents are often advised not to learn and use sign language with their deaf child for fear that sign language will hinder the child’s English language development and social skills. In terms of possible educational placements and social development, schools for the Deaf are often portrayed in a negative manner as institutions for deaf children who unable to succeed in the mainstream, and contact with the Deaf community is generally not recommended.

However, we now have a better understanding than in the past of deafness and how it may affect a child’s social and linguistic development. Deaf adults who have attended schools for the Deaf and use ASL are able to lead full and productive lives and become contributing members of society. They have positive self-esteem and are able to interact with both their Deaf peers and hearing people. Of the 30 million deaf people in the United States, about 200,000 consider themselves members of the Deaf community. While a hearing person unfamiliar with being deaf as a cultural construct may see it as an impairment, a significant number of Deaf adults do not see themselves in this manner. Instead, they see themselves as no less than their hearing peers—they just happen to be deaf. If anything, being deaf enhances their lives, and they cannot imagine being any other way.

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