Development of a Deaf Child
People and environments interact in ways that lead to what Gilbert Gottlieb called developmental science. What this phrase means is that there is a Person-Environmental bidirectional interaction where the whole person’s context and their genetic makeup influence each other. Outcomes are only probable not predetermined based on person-environmental fit.
For a deaf child, that context may be a good-fit where parents seek out effective language choices, school choices, and hearing technologies that lead to effective language and cognitive development. These parents are flexible and base decisions on the child’s ‘fit’ with their ongoing environment.
For another deaf child there may be a poor-fit where parents try their best and follow advice from medical and educational professionals including doctors, audiologists, speech language pathologists, and teachers that see a deaf child as needing to be ‘fixed’ so that they can be as ‘hearing’ as possible, regardless of the fit between the child and that specific environment.
Developmental science states that experience is the basis of all behaviors and that often these experiences are non-obvious. For example, most of the world is hearing, leading to an implicit assumption that speech equals language. However, research shows that the brain does not define speech as language. We know that as all infants (deaf or hearing) babble using both repetitive sounds and repetitive movements that are found in all languages of the world. With exposure, the baby selects those sounds (which are auditory phonemes) and/or those movements (visual phonemes) that are seen and heard in their own environment. (Phonemes are the smallest component of a language---ex ba or pa in spoken language or handshape or movement in sign languages.)
Therefore, we see that one size does not ‘fit’ all. Hearing technologies work for about 50% of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, but the other 50% have language delays that led to cognitive and academic delays. Relying on developmental science and understanding the bidirectional interactions between the person and environment will provide us information about how to create positive ‘fits’ between all deaf and hard of hearing children and their environments. We have created this infographic to visually represent these bidirectional interactions. We also attach a more complex article describing Gilbert Gottlieb’s theory. So, your deaf child is different and will provide you new experiences, but there is nothing to fear when the child-environmental fit is positive.