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The cochlear question : As the hearing parent of a deaf baby, I’m confronted with an agonising decision: should I give her an implant to help her hear?
by Abi Stephenson
I knew my daughter could hear: not just because she loved music, but because she had perfect rhythm. She punched her fists in the air like a human metronome, and brought a doughy heel to the ground precisely on each down beat. I had thrown off the yoke of milestone-tracking months earlier, having become fixated on her inability to roll during the precise developmental week for rolling. So when she didn’t form consonants at the prescribed time, I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. It didn’t occur to me that deafness might not be an either/or binary, and that certain vibrations and pitches – the down beat of a Wiggles song, say – could be apprehended, while other subtle speech sounds might be snatched out of a sentence. So it was a couple of months after her first birthday when we discovered our Botticellian baby had mild hearing loss, and two years after that when she lost almost all of her remaining hearing entirely.
Yes she should give her the cochlear implants of their is no risk to life or severe risk to quality of life and you can afford it
A baby is still developing their brain and sounds play a big part in that
It’s not even a question. Who could possibly think their child is better off deaf?
Imagine growing up and finding out your parents choose to deprive you of one of your senses.
Yeah absolutely
There are deaf people who see implants as erasing them and feel that deaf children should be accommodated, not “fixed.”
I don’t agree with them, hearing has clear advantages over not hearing, and one can always turn off their implants if they’d like to not hear for a while.
I actually have a child with a congenital genetic defect, if I could fix her genetic anomaly I’d so do in a heartbeat. Yes, it would probably change her, but her quality of life would be incomparabley better.
Anything else is fucking child abuse in my opinion.
Totally agree. I wear glasses and would get glasses for my kid if they needed them. Same thing.