Why Hearing Parents Don’t Sign
One of the strangest facts related to the signing community is that most hearing parents of Deaf children do not sign. It has been said that ninety-seven percent of hearing parents never learn ASL. Why aren’t more of them willing to learn sign language?
I used to have complicated theories about this, but one day it dawned on me that the answer is so simple it’s almost shocking. Most hearing parents don’t sign because they don’t want to communicate with their children.
Think about it for a second. If they wanted to communicate, why, it would only be natural that they would sign. The problem has nothing to do with sign language itself, certainly not access to learning it or the challenge of mastering it. Millions of people all over the world flock to sign language classes. Non-deaf signers outnumber Deaf signers. In the United States, ASL is second only to Spanish in its popularity as a “foreign” language.
You would think that parents have even more reason, no, the best reason, to learn sign language. Instead, it is one of the hardest, rarest things in the world for a parent to do. Why is that?
Most parents are conditioned, from their birth up, for the simple reason they were parented first before they became parents themselves, to engage in a power and control relationship with their children. This is taken so much for granted in our society that very few people are aware that children make up the most oppressed and abused population. True, children start out in life as small, making them vulnerable to—even magnets for—all sorts of mistreatment, but that doesn’t make them any less human or less deserving of respect.
Unfortunately, the Victorian view of children—“Children should be seen and not heard”—still permeates modern mainstream parenting culture. The biggest sickness in a relationship involving power and control is the absence of true communication. There may be a great deal of talk passing between parents and children, but a careful study will reveal that very little of it is real communication.
Because of their misguided belief that they must control their children through the manipulations of power, parents do not want communication to occur. They would find it immediately threatening. This results in their often saying things like “Don’t you dare talk back to me!” or “Because I said so!” If there is true communication, it immediately elevates children’s status, forcing adults to recognize them not as objects or second-class beings but as individuals with totally valid needs and desires that are just as important as their own. Few parents are prepared for such an egalitarian relationship with their children.
The power dynamics involved explain why fathers, in traditional hierarchical households, are less likely than mothers to learn sign language, and why the few signs they do know are non-negotiable signs of authority: NO, STOP, BED NOW. It also explains why hearing siblings, who are more or less equal to their Deaf siblings, are the family members most likely to sign. It’s no accident that most of the parents who do sign are “different” from the mainstream mold—open-minded, eccentric, radical. They may not always realize this, but often they are not only embracing sign language, bilingualism, or the cultural perspective of deafness, but an alternative style of parenting that lessens or removes the “versus” in their relationships, replacing it with, well, “with.”
Interestingly, the oral deaf community has the same problem. Despite their children’s skills in lipreading, most parents are unwilling to accommodate their needs in this area. They still say “Never mind” or “I’ll tell you later.” But there are a few oralist parents who take care to look at their children before speaking, pause between turns, gamely repeat themselves, and take pains to include their deaf children in the family. I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of such sensitive oralist parents is comparable to the percentage of parents who do sign with their Deaf signing children. But this is not a manualist versus oralist issue. This isn’t even a problem unique to deafness. It’s a much deeper concern having to do with parenting, power and control, and what it means to truly communicate.
Another interesting phenomenon is that some non-signing parents do learn how to sign … later, often too late. There are many stories telling of how a parent got a new Deaf coworker at the office, or comes into contact with Deaf people at church. All of a sudden, the parent is eager to learn sign language. Why now, after five, ten, fifteen, twenty years of living with their own flesh and blood? Simple: the new relationships with these Deaf adults are not stuck in the quagmire of power and control. Other stories tell of hearing parents’ hands magically coming to life when they find themselves to be new grandparents of their Deaf children’s Deaf children. This happened in my family. My grandfather never signed much to his Deaf daughter until the day he learned his grandson was Deaf. Again, the key here is power: The traditional grandparent-grandchild relationship is thankfully much less wrapped up in control than the traditional parent-child relationship.
That the medical perspective of deafness is relentlessly presented to parents doesn’t help. The idea that Deaf children are impaired, in need of treatment and rehabilitation, only discourages parents from regarding their children as individual human beings worthy of equal respect and true communication. So the battle against audism shouldn’t stop with changing parents’ attitudes toward deafness, but should address the very nature of the growing people we call children. Why? Because parents can, and do, learn sign language only to exercise power and control over their Deaf children in different but equally abusive ways. Within the signing community, even Deaf parents need to understand what true communication with their children requires. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be much better than all those hearing parents who do not sign.
The question to ask hearing parents, then, is “Do you want to communicate with your children?” If their answer is yes, there are no excuses for not learning sign language. No excuses. If their answer is no, their crime goes beyond merely neglecting to sign. Their crime is perpetuating the oppression and abuse of children, passing on the power and control cycle to the next generation, and the next, and who knows when it will finally be broken?
