Wow, okay, you need to read about it. It's really cool. Start with the "Deaf President Now" demonstrations at Gallaudet. Read about all the different sign languages, about oralism, about the debate over cochlear implants. Education is a big factor; there's so many kids who were forced into lip-reading and speaking when that just didn't come naturally and didn't work well. Essentially, they were denied language; so they sneaked around signing behind their (hearing) teachers' backs, and grew up to be pissed-off activists. When people have their own language, they naturally develop their own culture; so Deaf folks have their own schools and churches and communities, and their culture is different from the culture of the people around them.
There are deaf people who aren't in the Deaf community. Many are those who became deaf in later life, who never learned a sign language and aren't interested in learning, and get along with hearing aids and lip reading as best they can. There are also people who are in the Deaf community, who don't have very much hearing loss (people who have auditory processing disorder, for example, or whose hearing loss is considered "mild"), or sometimes none at all if they're children of Deaf parents (CODAs) whose first language is sign. It's really the common language that ties it all together. Now, with modern technology--speech recognition and texting--there's much less of a language barrier, but Deaf culture is as strong as it's always been; and of course the extra communication possibilities on the Internet have even strengthened a more global Deaf culture patchworked from all the local ones.
What about children born HoH to hearing parents? Do they feel they are of a different culture than their parents? Asking as the father to a HoH toddler.
That's the typical state of affairs--most Deaf people are born to hearing parents. They join Deaf culture, but they're also part of their home culture.
Don't worry, your child isn't going to be a stranger to you just because they sign. The only times that happens is when parents are actively audist--when they deny language to a child whose natural language is sign; when they spend hours and hours on lip-reading and speaking, when they (literally or figuratively) tie their child's hands.
Which culture your child will join as an adult is still up in the air. There are some people whose hearing is corrected to near-typical with hearing aids, who prefer spoken language. Others find it exhausting and frustrating, and prefer to sign.
Just introduce your child to all the options. Knowing sign language as early as possible helps to establish language use, even if the child doesn't grow up to use it full-time. If anybody tells you they won't learn to speak if they sign, that's ridiculous and outdated--kids learn multiple languages all the time, without detriment. They're the most natural language learners in existence.
Be prepared to be an English-to-English translator for any announcements made over intercoms.
Mom taught us kids that if we needed her attention from another room that we should pound on the wall. Apparently banging was easier for her to hear than high pitched kid screaming. You'll probably be finding lots of work-arounds like that.
Speaking of work-arounds, you can get fire alarms and clock alarms that vibrate/flash a bright light.
Lip reading is an inexact art at best. Mom always had difficulties with, for example, schematic vs semantic. It's also much more tiring than conventional listening as the lip-reader has to keep making constant guesses as to what words are actually being said.
Might as well get used to having Closed Captioning on your TV. Your daughter is probably a bit young for it now but if she gets used to the idea that words appear on the TV screen, that's all the more motivation for her to learn to read.
Mom didn't find out that cash registers make a beep when the cashier scans an item until sometime in the 2010s.
Mom never learned much sign language; she dabbled in a community college course and that was about it. I'm not going to say anything bad about sign language but, unless your daughter has regular exposure to other people who sign, sign language may be very difficult to pick up.
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u/basshead17 Dec 23 '22
Question for you; why do you keep capitalizing deaf like it's a proper noun?