I gave birth to Taylor when I was twenty years old. I was a sophomore in college when my parents retired to Florida. In an attempt to create a good life for us, I left Chicago at the age of 23 to teach in NYC. Over the past seven years, I obtained three academic degrees and traveled to three different cities. As the parent of an autistic child I experienced some of the best and worst challenges on…
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Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, and those parents usually want to fix the deafness. Many deaf people, however, believe that their condition is the basis of a unique and invaluable culture with its own language, arts, and traditions.
Deaf people enjoy more political clout and have more social acceptance than ever before. At the same time, the cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that can provide many deaf people with some semblance of hearing, threatens to eradicate Deaf culture as it now exists.
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The Good Life: Autism IL , United States -
Jennifer B. Long live the struggle ON , Canada Where to begin. We didn't really know any deaf people before Harry was identified as deaf at the age of 4 months. The idea of "Deaf culture" seemed crazy to me. How could my baby have a different culture to our own? It was as crazy as if the audiologist had said "It turns out your son is congenitally Jewish, you're going to have to buy a second set of dishes and learn Hebrew." No. Culture is something…
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