A Mother’s Story of Language Choices for Her Son With Hearing Loss

Editor’s Note: As part of our recent feature on guiding parents through their language choices for children with hearing loss, we asked a mother to share her story. Here’s the experience of Mari Kuraishi: Five years ago, we picked up our son Calvin in Hangzhou, China. We’d been cocky as world travelers and set up our own travel arrangements—flown to Shanghai direct, and planned on taking the high-speed train to Hangzhou (less than an hour). We got ourselves to the train station successfully, but realized pretty quickly that all the seats were booked; we couldn’t just get on the train. We eventually got ourselves from the train station out to a bus station and eventually to the city of Hangzhou on a two-hour bus ride that dropped us off in a quasi-industrial part of town at around 9 in the evening. Let’s just say we were a bit strung out when we met Calvin the next day at the city hall offices bright and early at 9 a.m. But it was nothing compared to how strung out he must have been after three and a half years of having no access to language. All we know is that he was found (not far from the bus station we’d landed at the night before) at the light industrial goods market a year and half before, at what doctors estimated was about 2 years old. They diagnosed him immediately with profound hearing loss, and everyone in the orphanage made special efforts to treat the little boy with extra care. But that didn’t include specialized education, which meant ...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tags: Audiology Hearing Assistive Technology hearing loss Language Disorders Source Type: blogs