Sean's Language

In answer to a comment that was posted, I want to explain how Sean communicates with us and how we communicate to him. First, he does not talk at all. He laughs, he cries, but he doesn't talk. He is totally deaf. His residual vision is so poor that he can't see anything unless it's pretty big, or very brightly colored.

His signing is very limited. He can sign his basic needs - relating to food, to hygiene, to basic needs. He does not have the language needed to express complex or complicated concepts: time, future, etc. His signs are limited to the here and now. He knows some signs for different foods, he knows signs for mother, father, family, car, horse, etc.

A lot of deaf people will agree that the more sign language a person can learn early, the better. Sean's early years were spent in Denmark, where he was born. He attended a special school for the deafblind. There, signing was done around the clock. Sign language was part of his every waking moment. Sean came home on the weekends and went back to school on Monday mornings. A lot of parents of kids there, including us, found it difficult to keep up with the signing our deafblind children were doing. We took classes in order to help bridge the gap.

When we moved to the USA, we found out the unbelievable: that American Sign Language (ASL) was TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Danish Sigh Language. In one move, Sean lost all his language!

In trying to get Sean into school here, we found to our dismay that there were NO programs for the deafblind, although it was a fairly large urban region. There were NO deafblind experts here. Not only were there no deafblind experts, but the local school authorities were much more interested in making sure we didn't create trouble for them, than seeing that our son got appropriate education according to his needs. We heard all the catch phrases about "appropriate education" but the school system did ANYTHING BUT provide it.

It was a very very hard two years. It took that long until Sean started signing using ASL, thanks to the help of an extraordinary woman, Maureen Tesler, the Executive Director at that time, of the Center On Deafness.

With fantastic help from Maureen, who took Sean under her wing and worked with him for 1 hour per week, Sean began to learn and use ASL. Even so, it was a long, slow process for us all to learn ASL. I took classes and tried to teach Sean's dad what I was learning. Sean's dad was holding down 3 jobs at the time, just to make ends meet.

Anyway, Sean began using more and more ASL and he also made up his own signs for things. Maureen was quick to see that and to help us encourage Sean to communicate any way he could!

Another obstacle in the way of Sean's communication, was that we found that every teacher, every school Aide, every person Sean had interaction with during the day, WAS SIGNING DIFFERENTLY to him and demanding DIFFERENT signs back from him!!! Could it be any worse? So everyone was put on a rigid program of signing the same way. It took some weeks for that to take effect, but it did help a lot. Sean, who had been very upset for a large portion of his day (gee!) began to settle down and get back to the happy Sean we knew and loved.

Sometimes Sean just gets mad. Not often, but once in a while. It's my own opinion that those are the times Sean just gets so very frustrated with his lack of language that there's nothing to do but get mad about it. His bouts of upset don't last long, and we do everything we can to help him keep extorverted and interested in his environment. But it's gotta be tough.