Deaf Like Me
by Thomas S. Spradley, James P. Spradley

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• Health o Meter HDC100-01 "Grow with Me" Teddy Bear Scale for Babies and Toddlers

Book Reviews of Deaf Like Me

Book Review: Book Report and Opinion Analysis
Summary: 5 Stars

This was a book about a family struggling with many different aspects of character and life issues. The first and most important being Speech and Language. Without Speech and Language and an ability to communicate what does a person have?

First I will review the story. This is about an average family who must undergo the frustrating issues of dealing with a disability. Disability from the normal patterns of everyday life. Here the person and persons affected first dealt with the dehabilitating effects of the disease Rubella during pregnancy, which is still very harsh on pregnant woman. Thank God for MMR shots - Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccines which our children have today.

I could empathize with the Mrs. Spradley during this ordeal, she had to deal with this outbreak of Rubella and the normal pressures and fears of pregnancy. She conferred with supposed experts looking for divine guidance to let her know that everything was all right and yet no such intervention was forthcoming. Just the normal fears that come with pregnancy can be overwhelming. Here she had to deal with a very real possibility that something could be amiss. To her credit she pursued all avenues of logical alternatives and made a sound decision based on the many parameters of facts to which she exposed herself.

She was blessed with a beautiful baby girl which her and her husband named Lynn. Everything seemed perfect with baby Lynn. She seemed to respond to her brothers attentions her mothers attentions and her fathers administrations. It wasn't until one day during a fourth of July Parade that Lynn did not respond to fire engines which were wailingly loud that the parents, particularly her mother knew that ! things were amiss...The patience, the love the frustration and the determination to have their daughter assimilate into the hearing world are what the rest of the book is about. The dedication they had to their daughter is astounding. Things that so many take for granted so hard for them to come by. Just the word "Ball, Ball, Ball" a one syllable repetitive sound repeated one zillion times and still not able to be interpreted by Lynn.

Here are some hard facts that the parents had to deal with. In the argument of oralist verses sign language it seemed terribly abusive for the parents to tie the child's hands so they could not gesture and yet, as with any parent when you are so focused on an ideal you try not to see the negative side.

Lynn's breakthrough in her life came as she became older. Her parents were courageous enough to want to try to help and understand her and they went against the mainstream philosophy of oral! ism and explored other avenues in which to proceed in helping their child overcome communication frustration.

-2-

The second page of this report is my ideas, opinions and ideas of what I felt toward this book. First I must give you a parameter of why and where my opinions come from. First I am not a parent or sibling or child of someone deaf in my family. I am however interested in the deaf and deaf culture and am a student of such. Therefore, this book was an assignment.

Much to my co-students dismay, after reading this book and following Lynn's progress with speech therapy and signing and the opening of communication had Lynn been my child I still would have taken the oralist approach. I feel that I might have been more receptive to signing but I would have still tried to have my child learn to lip-read to assimilate into the hearing world.

As a student of the deaf culture and knowing some deaf persons I feel that the deaf who can communicate even in the most rudimentary fashion with the hearing populace tend to be able to cross and navigate both worlds. Whereas, the deaf that have consigned themselves to muteness, either due to not being able to articulate the sounds or via choice are relegated to the deaf culture and only the deaf culture. If Lynn were my child I would have wanted her to have a choice. If she chose the deaf culture and was able to articulate sounds than that would be her choice, if she chose the deaf culture because she could not articulate the sounds because the speech was too intricate than at least I would know that I had tried everything I could possibly do to mainstream my child into a non-disabled populace.

Herein lies the premise of this book...

I know in my studies this is not the most popular view, but if it were my daughter or my son I would want to give them every possible opportunity to mainstream before they ended up with only sign language. However, I do realize that sign is a total language in itself and I do respect that.

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