The Silent child

[Puffycat]

I’ve just watched this award winning short film and am in bits!
My DH said ‘oh you’ll enjoy it, it’s uplifting ‘
Uplifting my arse!
I’m so cross at the stupid parents. Surely the first thing you do when you have a deaf child is learn sign language!
The bit at the end when Libby signs ‘I love you’ to her therapist finished me off!
I just hope it raised awareness

the better one is at spoken languages, the more one tends to struggle with manually coded languages i really struggle with foreign spoken languages, and have found learning bsl a lot easier than learning French.

Reading with interest as the parent of a pre-school child with moderate hearing loss which drops to severe with fluid who has worn hearing aids since she was 4 months old (well 12 months properly)
I was advised not to sign with her and even though I had signed a little with her older sister I followed this advice.
Am now wondering if that was bad advice?? She speaks well but I'm worried about her starting school and going into a class of 30.

Are you being supported by NDCS, Muddling? They would probably be best placed to offer support/advice on your options.

They would show us the sign and we would them be supposed to repeat it. I would watch and it was gone. Like people say “in one ear and out the other.”

muddling this bad advice is often given. Ironic really as sign is encouraged with hearing babies to promote language but discouraged with deaf babies.

As parents we listen to the professionals. It's not too late to start introducing signs and seeing how she responds would certainly help with times when drops to severe

I had a moderate loss through school and only learn as an adult. I missed so much and trundled through school. Life would have been much easier with sign language. I'm still discovering things I missed or misunderstood as an adult now in my 40s

As a ToD I just wanted to say a couple of things!

CIs do not always completely eliminate residual hearing. In fact some implants are hybrid with a hearing aid to amplify sound to residual hearing.

To qualify for a CI, the person must have permanent profound loss in certain high frequencies in their better ear. Their low frequencies may be better but it’s the high frequencies that are crucial for hearing speech. There are other considerations regarding their anatomy that affect eligibility.

Most deaf children come from hearing families. So signing is difficult- it’s like trying to speak to your baby in a completely foreign language that you’ve never known before yourself. Many deaf people wish to speak as well as signing. Most people in this world speak and do not sign. If you can only sign it is wonderful to be part of a signing community but it can be isolating and frustrating not to access the speaking world.

CIs and hearing aids do not restore hearing but I feel this technology is not being given enough credit here. I work with aided and CI children who have amazing oral speech and language skills. The technology has advanced massively in the past 10 years, so broadly speaking deaf adults have a very different school experience and childhood to deaf children today.
I love sign language too and always recommend it but it is not the only way for deaf people to communicate. Most deaf children are oral.
We work with deaf adults and some of the children don’t recognise themselves as deaf because they speak and their families are hearing. It can be confusing for them.

Deaf purely signing pupils would have a level 3 + signing TA or ToD with them. Many TAs and ToDs don’t use sign in their daily work life because the children they work with don’t sign. Instead they work in developing S&L skills.

Authorities are generally underfunded and more money is needed to provide the better technology and increased support.

I’d love to see sign language used more in early years settings and schools as it can help language development for deaf and hearing children. I have never advised parents against signing but I do know it happens.

It’s not as simple as ‘ah deaf child, right let’s sign’. In the film the parents are completely disengaged from the child in many ways.
Loved it though and it was an important stark message.

I’m going to come back and read the thread properly because this is fascinating. My ds has Visual Imaparement from birth and there seem to be similarities with being told things by drs as gospel that maybe need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I can’t imagine how isolating being deaf is so (like everyone else) assumed sign language would be first priority. I really cannot believe it costs money to learn! For goodness sake it must be counting as learning an essential language! I must go and check the situation with Braille, ds doesn’t use it but we know lots that do. Also it interesting about the parents not accepting and drs encouring “treating as normal” at any cost.
We did a proper BSL course at Guides, I wonder who taught that.

Thought it was fab.
But I hadn't realised, when I saw it getting Oscars and awards that it was only A 20 minute clip. I thought it was in a full 2 1/2 or 3 hour film like a standard going to the cinema film.

I didn't realise it was just a short film. ideally I would've liked it to be a proper full film and then then it could've addressed even more issues.

Is it supposed to be in 2017?
Really? Such ignorant parents. No HV picked up? No nursery leading to school, planning extra support?

I thought those bits were so naff that are we honestly supposed to believe that this would have been allowed to happen in this day and age?

phlewf I managed to wangle a student discount for level 1 and then paid for the first couple terms of level 2. If I'd had a deaf child or sibling or colleague, it would have been free at the time, but if it was because you were deaf, no discount at all.

I'm terrible at copying actions. I managed OK at level 1 with single signs, but trying to flow them together and do inflection for level 2 was impossible. The only student who did well was a dancer.

As it happens, everyone I sign with has English as their first language, so it's very much Sign Supported English we end up using. Still makes conversation that much easier for those of us with little hearing - even the odd letter sign to indicate who is being spoken about makes conversations more relaxing.

No HV picked up? I had two, yes that is 2, health visitors repeatedly ignore and actively dissuade concerns that we had wrt whether our dc could hear/was deaf.
So I can assure you that in some areas this does happen.

We had a preschool lie about using sign to communicate with our dc. We had a school employ someone who could not sign to work with our deaf dc.
Do you want to hazard a guess at how much progress said child made in mainstream school?

I am also aware of a family of a profoundly deaf child that had to fight to get referral for Cochlear implants, and actively dissuaded from signing, and even reported to (non signing) social workers because they did not speak verbally to their profoundly deaf child. A child for whom cochlear implants are not a miracle cure.

I have modern language qualifications and picked up 3 oral languages easily. I could not retain the bsl I learned. I was bottom of the class

Ha! This was my experience too. In fact , whenever I didn’t know the sign for a particular word or phrase, my brain would send the ‘say it in foreign language 1’ message to my mouth and out would come the foreign words rather than the sign! It was like I had no control!

Frusso, oh that's no surprise.
We had school, HV and school counsellor lie in reports on Ds1!
Many parents experience such things on the SN boards!!

@Oblomov18 what makes it all the more frustrating is people thinking it doesn't happen, that it can't happen, not in this day and age.

But it does.

Which I feel this film highlights (ignoring the parents because I've never met parents like them) that there are children like Libby that fall through the net, that are failed by multiple people around them.

My friend has a granddaughter who's deaf. Her mum is fluent in sign language, but her daughter prefers to lip read as she feels using sign language draws attention to her.

Actually deaf people can learn to speak even without hearing. It is obviously difficult but almost always, I've been told, they will learn to speak.

You need to meet more Deaf adults and young people - not all can learn to speak despite years of intensive speech therapy. Some of them are angry and bitter as they could have been getting a proper education instead of wasting all that time.

Camiila I'm sorry but you're talking shit.

There is a huge shortage of qualified registered BSL interpreters in the UK - and most prefer to be earning a maximum income (which is their right esp since they will have funded their own training) by choosing lucrative contracts. LEA/school contracts are not. Therefore I would be amazed that every place you've worked in has managed to snap up all those interpreters.

The fact that you called them scribes and translators show that at best you're exaggerating and at worse lying.

At university I had a deaf friend who was doing teacher training. She told me wanted to work in a specialist school eventually, but in order to do this she had to work in mainstream for two years first. I would have thought this would have put people off training for a specialist school if they were also deaf.

We watched this, pleased that it won the Oscar.

I watched the film this afternoon. I'm not sure what to make of it. Certainly atmospheric, and the little girl was adorable, but the child's genetic history introduced a red herring that would be better explored as a separate topic.

And was it exlpained why she had some residual hearing but no hearing aid(s)? I also found it hard to believe that a film set in 2017 wpuldn't have parents googling and mumsnetting for support.

I also watched an interesting short docu from the BSL Zone. It wad exploring young adults who had unplugged their cochlear implants. It was filmed in Switzerland where the education of deaf children appears a lot different from England. Worth a watch.

Camiila I'm sorry but you're talking shit.

The fact that you called them scribes and translators show that at best you're exaggerating and at worse lying.

yeah, yeah, whatever, I am telling you what my day to day experience has been over many years.

I'm joining in the conversation by including what I know and experience to the information from others. What would be the point in lying about it?

it doesn't fit in with what you want to believe, for whatever reason, I don't really care, you for strange reasons of your own would rather believe and spread propaganda that no deaf children are being properly supported, when I m telling you that where I am they have AMPLE support.

maybe you genuinely didn't know that, but you do now, cos I've told you. Why you choose not to believe it is beyond me. or maybe you did know that all the time but it doesn't fit in with your political message, so you would rather call me a liar for explaining something which you don't want to be public knowledge.

I can't say I understand your reasoning, but I'm sure you have your motives for preferring to promote untruths.

if you did actually have any genuine interest or concern over what the actual levels of available support are in real life, you would be pleased to hear how good they are in some places.

Camiila How many schools have you worked in?

Because if it's more than one or two then I would be amazed if your experience was recent in the state sector.

The first three schools I worked in (learning support) were excellent. I could have seen myself saying that support resources were really good in places. After those three though it was a whole other story. And I now realise with many more years experience, and the relentless cutbacks, that the key with those schools was actually that they had far less children who needed support, therefore when I went in I had far more time per child and progress was easier and better as a result.

I don't really care, you for strange reasons of your own would rather believe and spread propaganda that no deaf children are being properly supported, when I'm telling you that where I am they have AMPLE support.

@Camiila that may be true in the school that you work in. It does not make it true for the rest of the country.

If there's is the AMPLE support that you claim, I and many other parents of deaf children across the country would like to know where the fuck this ample support is? because I personally have had to battle with a number of LAs in order to get even basic support for my deaf child.
And no fucking propaganda there!

Mostly it is a postcode lottery as to what services are available. And sometimes how loudly you, as a parent shout, determines what level of support you get. Why county you happen to live in determine whether your deaf child has access to bsl or whether an aural approach is pushed.

Nobody has claimed ALL deaf children across the country are not being properly supported, but equally you cannot claim that ALL deaf children are.
Because I can assure you from personal experience that they are not!

@Camiila that may be true in the school that you work in. It does not make it true for the rest of the country.

It isn't true of the school that she works in. You could probably count on one finger the number of people in the UK who have a level 6 in BSL, a CSW qualification and a language modification qualification.

And then she referred to the "scribes" in her school(s) as being "qca registered".

Totally fantasy.