Deaf Kid
I imagine most of you know Finn first hand. He is five years old, a little on the tall side of things, and very talkative. He is also deaf. He has been since birth and he will be for his whole life.
On the telly and in movies hearing loss is measured in percentage loss, but in the real world we measure hearing by the quietest noise a person can hear. For most people this is between zero and twenty decibels. Finn’s hearing is a little different at different frequencies (this is true for everyone) but the softest sounds he can hear are between forty and fifty decibels.
Just recently someone we know well lent us a film called Mr Holland’s Opus. They told Nicky the basic story which includes Mr Holland’s son being “disabled”. Now this kid doesn’t have a range of disabilities and he’s not in a wheelchair or an artificial lung. He is just deaf. Quite deaf, much more so than Finn, but nevertheless just deaf.
I guess I found it odd that this character was described to Nicky as disabled rather than deaf. It’s not a word that makes us wince or that we find painful. Finn has hearing aids just like Nicky and I have glasses. We even choose colourful hearing aids so people can comment on how nice or bright they are. They will always be visible and, especially when he is a kid, it’s important for adults to have a cue that they need to speak clearly to him.
One of our real pleasures is to watch Finn play with other kids at the park. He always goes and talks to them and starts bossing them into some kind of activity or game. The others kids almost always ask him what is in his ears.
“They’re my hearing aids. They help me hear.”
And that’s the first and last thing he or they say about the matter. As for us, it’s ok to mention that he is deaf. We know. It’s also ok to mention that he’s bossy and won’t eat his vegetables. We know that too. Hopefully these are things he might grown out of one day.
Lesson for the day – you can say deaf (even if the person in question might not hear you all that well).
Previously on this date..
- Longing For Lucid - 2007
- Tuesday Questions - 2007
- epoch - 2007
- Dial M For Clever - 2006
- Trevor Of Little Things - 2005
- Font Of Knowledge - 2005
- Men In PJs - 2005
- There's A Bear In There - 2005
- Five Years Old - 2004
- Backpacker Week - 2004
- April Come She Will - 2004
- Reading Maps - 2004
- Conventions - 2004
- Popular - 2004
- On The Road Again - 2004
- By By Buy - 2004
- Shopping - 2003
- Tim's song is at number - 2002
- Well I am still using - 2002
- For those of you suffering - 2002
- Now this is a test - 2002
- So much for that theory. - 2002
- I have another theory that - 2002
- Looking on the blogger front - 2002
- I have just finished the - 2002
- And once again publishing is - 2002
- People With People - 2002
- New and Old - 2002
- Precious - 2002
- No Bogans - 2002
you’re dipping into disability politics there! there is a large group of people who describe deafness as a culture, not a disability. those people are mostly profoundly deaf people who use Auslan as their first language and who mix mostly with other deaf people and you can see why that could be described as a culture. those people would also mostly write Deaf with a capital D.
also, in australia currently we generally subscribe to the social model of disability which assumes that rather than people’s impairments being the problem, the problem is that society isn’t set up to accommodate the diversity in people’s abilities. so we say that people are disabled by society, not by their body. in that context i guess finn doesn’t experience the feeling of being disabled because so far society has been able to accommodate his hearing levels.
of course, that’s all theory and i’m just babbling on because i’ve been reading and writing about such stuff at work today. i look forward to having this conversation with the adult Finn one day – and it will be interesting (to me, anyway) to see where disability politics sit then.