*Caveat: I know nothing about parenting a deaf child. I didn’t personally know any deaf person until I was in my forties.
I started to search the web, as if I had just discovered that my baby/child was deaf.
Start with a search for “Deaf Child” or “Parenting a Deaf Child” – You can get to
http://deafness.about.com/c/ec/1.htm – “Your Deaf Child”
An email series on raising deaf children. I don’t know what it’s about, since it’s a newsletter so I click on some other tabs, and find…
http://deafness.about.com/od/newtodeafness/u/dailylife.htm#s2 – Parenting Deaf or Hard of Hearing Children and Teens
There are some good resources here, but how about something that will help me when I just discovered my baby is deaf?
Search for “Raising a deaf child”, you can get
http://www.raisingdeafkids.org/ Raising Deaf Kids by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Special sections:
http://www.raisingdeafkids.org/growingup/ gives links to dealing with it at different ages.
http://www.raisingdeafkids.org/communicating/choices/ gives the different ways that a deaf/hh child can be taught to communicate.
http://www.raisingdeafkids.org/meet/parents/communicating.php Parents talk about how they decided
This looks like a great resource! If you are deaf, or a deaf parent, please evaluate and comment. It looks like a good presentation of the information that the parent of a deaf child would want to know, presented in a way they might be asking questions.
Other than that, I don’t find many results that answer my questions, and help me research the options. If you have other websites, that are geared toward really helping a parent with the questions they might have, please post them!
Remember when telling your stories of your deaf experiences on the internet, that deaf parents will be watching to understand what their child will be experiencing, so please subtitle those experiences, to help them to understand what it is like to be deaf, to experience being left out of family holidays, or the helpfulness of being around other deaf, and signing, or the experience of going to a deaf/totalcommunication/Auditory-Verbal education. I would like to see those links too, and put together some resources for the deaf and hard of hearing services organization in my town.
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