Showing posts with label hearing baby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hearing baby. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
The power of a positive message with no hate on sign language
Here's a video of my 1 year old precocious baby at her 1st birthday party showing the many signs with Mom, Dad, and Grandpa asking Heather how to sign a particular word. She is my oldest daughter of the three girls (all hearing) I have and she just turned 19 years old recently. In this clip she signed several different words such as baby, table, tree, more, thank you, tummy, nose, ear, "Heather" (her name sign) and so on. In this video you can see people were asking her to sign certain words verbally like "Show me 'more' " and she would sign "more." This is a simple video using positive examples the power of using sign language with none of the deaf politics and hate in the effort to push an ideology. Avoid that and you'll go farther with your simple but positive message instead of hate. My daughter today is fluent in sign language.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Video: How to promote a positive picture of ASL without attacking...
The simplest and best to way to promote ASL is to focus on the positive only. No need to attack individuals or organizations for having a different opinion or philosophy. Below is my 1994 video of my hearing daughter, Heather, at her 1st birthday showing her cute way of responding to family's request on how to sign certain words. This is her at exactly 1 year old seeing how precocious of a child she was at the time when it came to signing and understanding the spoken language. This is exactly how ASL can be promoted in such a positive and enjoyable manner to parents of hearing and deaf children.
I am responding here to show people that I do support ASL for children with hearing loss. I even support the use of signing for hearing and deaf/hh babies because the benefit is the ease of communication for the baby or toddler. But in the same vein I also support the parents right and duty to make an informed decision regarding communication and educational options for their child with a hearing loss. Depending on circumstances or philosophies if the parents make an informed decision and decide to forgo signing then we have to respect that and move on.
Amy Cohen exemplified this very simple concept on the promotion of ASL a few years back in a discussion lost somewhere in the pages of Google history. I agree with her that the best way to promote ASL for children is to focus only on the positive. If there are leaders or people directly connected to an organization trying to promote ASL that have a habit of making personal and public attacks to other individuals or organizations then that organization will not succeed in its goal. It will fail. Why? Because people get turned off when an organization decides to go from a positive goal to a negative one. A goal cannot be achieved if one decides to focus more on the negative attacking than the promotion of ASL. Someone needs to make a decision on how this goal is achieved and maintained. I have no tolerance when I get personally attacked on a very public internet by an organization trying to promote ASL. I have my own opinions and philosophies. Either privately agree to disagree and move on. For an organization to publicly attack people can only make it look weaker and raises questions on the integrity of an organization's own goal in promoting the positive value and benefits of ASL to young children with hearing loss.
I am responding here to show people that I do support ASL for children with hearing loss. I even support the use of signing for hearing and deaf/hh babies because the benefit is the ease of communication for the baby or toddler. But in the same vein I also support the parents right and duty to make an informed decision regarding communication and educational options for their child with a hearing loss. Depending on circumstances or philosophies if the parents make an informed decision and decide to forgo signing then we have to respect that and move on.
Amy Cohen exemplified this very simple concept on the promotion of ASL a few years back in a discussion lost somewhere in the pages of Google history. I agree with her that the best way to promote ASL for children is to focus only on the positive. If there are leaders or people directly connected to an organization trying to promote ASL that have a habit of making personal and public attacks to other individuals or organizations then that organization will not succeed in its goal. It will fail. Why? Because people get turned off when an organization decides to go from a positive goal to a negative one. A goal cannot be achieved if one decides to focus more on the negative attacking than the promotion of ASL. Someone needs to make a decision on how this goal is achieved and maintained. I have no tolerance when I get personally attacked on a very public internet by an organization trying to promote ASL. I have my own opinions and philosophies. Either privately agree to disagree and move on. For an organization to publicly attack people can only make it look weaker and raises questions on the integrity of an organization's own goal in promoting the positive value and benefits of ASL to young children with hearing loss.
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