ASL

 

I absolutely love the show Switched at Birth. Not just because it is a good show but because of what it represents.

The show stands for people who are different, but should not be made fun of or ostracized from society because they are different. It is an amazing thing that because they were born without or "lost" their hearing that they are able to communicate in a completely different way.

I'll admit that I have not always been accepting of people who are deaf. Not because they were different but because I had a not so nice encounter with a deaf person so it made me wary of any deaf person.

Around the time that the show started my brother began taking ASL classes at the school as an elective. He would tell me about his interactions in the deaf community and I thought it was amazing. A lot of stuff on the show seemed accurate. People view the deaf people differently, like they are handicapped. They are teased and misunderstood just because they can't hear. Which I find ironically funny because we can hear but most of the time we just choose not to listen. Speaking sign language means you have to pay attention to understand what is being said. So you are more likely to actually listen to what the other person is saying.

But one of the very disappointing things about this situation is that there are times when a hearing family has a deaf child and many times instead of trying to learn an easier way to communicate with the child they force the child to try to keep up with their conversations by reading lips. I can't read lips for crap so I know if that was me I would be out of luck. I could understand it would be difficult to learn a new language but wouldn't you want to communicate with your child the best way possible? And learning sign language would also open you up to a whole new and amazing community of people.

It really upsets me that some parents would not do whatever they could to communicate with their kids. I learned a few signs so that before my kids could talk I taught them how to sign to communicate with me what they wanted. I want to be able to give me kids whatever they need and that means being able to communicate with them. So if you can't properly communicate with your child then how could they every really be satisfied in life and how could you know they have everything they need?