Raising A Deaf Child Essay

Every expecting parent dreams and wishes for nothing more than the delivery of a whole and healthy child, and while things don’t always go according to plan, it’s important to remain focused on the positive. There are many opportunities and resources available to families with of deaf children. Lately, many medical professionals and social media sites have been singing the praises of the pediatric cochlear implant, some going as far as to say that to deprive a child of an implant would be to deprive them of a decent way of life. While each case is completely separate from another, and should be treated as such, the purpose of this paper is to argue that it would be in the child’s best interest to introduce both them and their hearing family to deaf culture and raise the child in that culture until they, alone, are of the mind that they would prefer to undergo cochlear implant surgery. The first step in raising a child who is hard of hearing or deaf is to accept the fact that they are, in fact, hard of hearing or deaf. According to Virginia Frazier-Maiwald and Lenore M. Williams’ advice book, Keys to Raising a Deaf Child, it is important to be …show more content…
People within the community will be able to provide resources regarding medical professionals, educational plans, workshops as well as first-hand opinions on topics that hearing parents may otherwise not know about. “Although a doctor may have a lot of medical knowledge, he does not know what it feels like to be a deaf person and may not know what a deaf person would want. It is more important to listen to someone who has experiences a similar situation as your child” (Frazier-Maiwald and Lenore M. Williams, 39). The deaf community offers many inclusive programs for deaf children such as church groups, sports teams, clubs, and after-school programs. The deaf community can also help with the search for proper school