“I miss what my siblings are saying so I just follow whatever they’re doing, like playing kickball or softball. They’d make archery arrows, I’d make one too. If they’re building a house, I’d build one too.”
—Jasmine
One day at grandma’s house, at the age of nineteen months, my cousin and I were playing near the kitchen. Startled by pots crashing on the floor, she cried and I didn’t. At the urging of our uncle, I then began the trek to doctors, audiologists and speech therapists; my sister tagged along. When I was about five, my parents placed me at the Lexington School for the Deaf in NYC. Three years later, administrators assessed the speech and language development of me and five of my classmates, and determined we were ready for public school. As soon as I transferred, my social network was demolished because Lexington had been the only place where I befriended deaf kids from deaf families who were like me but also knew ASL.
The depiction above of Marla’s early memories is not unusual. In contrast, Judy’s brother Larry, born hearing, was imitating speech and responding to their parents’ commands until he became sick with a “bad cold” at the age of 10 months which, in retrospect, was diagnosed as “creeping meningitis” at age four. For three years their parents interacted with him by simultaneously pointing and gesturing, never suspecting a hearing loss, since Larry seemed to be a natural lip-reader. Larry also had briefly attended the Lexington School and was declared an “oral success.” With encouragement of the school administrators, both sets of hearing parents—Marla’s and Larry’s—thirty years apart adhered to the recommendation that their deaf children were capable and ready to study and interact with hearing teachers and peers. Instead of entering a public school like Marla, Larry’s parents sent him to a private hearing school with smaller class sizes, anticipating it would provide easier access to lip-reading.
Being away from home and coming home changes family dynamics. Whether it is positive or negative depends on the interactions among family members. With many families with deaf children who stayed at dorms in deaf residential schools, coming home meant they would be isolated. Communication barriers are common among the family members, especially between siblings, regardless of whether they use speech or sign. In Judy’s family, the three siblings found a way to rectify the separation.
I couldn’t wait for my brother to come home from his high school on weekends. We would stay up late, laughing and eating. He moved on to college and soon after he graduated, our parents introduced him to several deaf people and he began bringing his deaf peers home.
For the first time, Judy met deaf people other than her brother at home. The comparison was incomprehensible. Judy often didn’t understand their speech, nor did they seem to understand hers. Even though the communication was difficult with them, Judy had also seen that speech was a constant source of stress, especially between Larry and their father.
I was an innocent observer. I would hear Larry ask dad to “Pass the salt” but dad would insist he pronounce the “s” in salt correctly before he would pass it. It felt like he had to say it a hundred times. I did not speak out, but my gut knew that something was not right. Instinctively, dad’s harping on Larry’s speech and telling him “Never mind” every time he asked what someone said, did not sit right with me.
As close siblings, Larry and Judy both knew communication was vital to their relationship in spite of his communication struggles in their home.
I wish that my parents and sisters learned sign language from the day my parents learned that I was deaf and my sisters were born. But that was in the 1940s, the height of the oral approach. I remember hating family gatherings and couldn’t wait until it was time to go home. As an adult, I accepted the fact that I really could not participate at such gatherings and started to isolate myself by going to the TV room, reading a book or magazine, or otherwise finding ways to keep myself occupied until it was time to go, much to the distress of some of the family, who tried to pull me into the group.
Mingling with many family members can be stressful when there are numerous conversations going on simultaneously. Siblings often turn to their peers for emotional support. Like Larry, alone in a hearing household, Marla has many recollections of family gatherings interacting with siblings and cousins.
Instinctively, I would often turn my head towards Julie, with a puzzled expression expecting her to lipread me as I mouthed “What?” Most often, she would keep me in the loop but at the same time, but I could tell she was annoyed by the interruptions. Anytime she got ready to explain, she would either say, “Wait, I’ll tell you in a minute,” or I would get a one- or two-sentence abbreviated version, with little or no nuances to provide understanding of the ideas in context, the players’ motivations or their separate contributions to the conversation. Perhaps my insisting on knowing what Julie took for granted potentially added fuel to the fire of our natural sibling tensions.
The tensions Marla and Julie experienced were also played out in Judy’s family where Mary Ann, the older sister, played a significant role. She was Larry’s oral interpreter: his window and guide in family discussions, with neighborhood children, with cousins and her friends when, as teenagers, they double dated. However, Judy, six years younger than Larry, could not avoid the angst occurring during family meals.
Frequently if our parents were talking about their day, Larry interrupted dad, shouting, “What?” And dad’s bark back was, “Never mind. It’s not important.” Without fail, Mary Ann jumped in, repeated the words, and often became the brunt of dad’s anger.
Evidently, using a hearing sibling to fill in the communication gaps can be a double-edge sword. The deaf sibling is continuously searching for ways to be part of the family interaction while the hearing sibling either willingly takes on or unwillingly is compelled to take on the responsibility to ensure their deaf sibling is part of the family.
Retrospectively, Larry reflected on how their parents’ expectations of Mary Ann affected their relationship:
Although I was the first born, my parents put responsibility on my sister, the number two birth child, to look after me as though she was the oldest child in the family…. Yet we were very close during our growing years. I believe that if my parents had not put that burden on her, we would have been just as close and she would have looked out for me on her own without the expectations put on her and I may have been more independent and empowered at the same time without the expectation.
In Marla and Larry’s families, the oldest sibling was deaf. In both cases, their parents directed a younger sibling who was closer in age, to “care for” the older sibling in a variety of ways. How did it affect the sibling relationships? The outcome was different: in Marla’s family it had negative consequences, whereas in Judy’s it had a positive outcome. Other siblings interviewed, where younger siblings had caretaking roles, revealed similar contrasting experiences.
Another layer affecting the interactions are the external influences that force changes in family dynamics resulting in either greater pleasure or deeper wounds. How might they foster or hinder sibling relationships? Communication is key, providing access to one another within the family setting, a never-ending imbalance between deaf and hearing siblings. In Marla’s family, the extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who gathered nearly every weekend, had plenty of opportunities to compound the potential for misreading one another, adding to the rivalry developing between Marla and her siblings. Furthermore, in her teens, their father’s death, followed by the deaths of other close relatives within a five-year span, caused relationships among family members to deteriorate, which often happens when death occurs. Adding to the complexity, Marla’s mother remarried, adding a second set of three siblings.
The DEAF-WORLD became my second family. Julie moved further away, creating her own network of friends and eventually her own family with two sons and a daughter. Joseph initially became closer to our first cousins and now has his own family with his three daughters. Although Joseph and Julie may be closer, I know the baggage from our childhood still haunts us.
Many siblings sweep their tensions under the rug, forming alliances with other family members. Siblings may find a common enemy or join forces to share their similar beliefs or perspectives about the pressing issues going on in the family. One unique difference with deaf and hearing siblings’ psychodynamics is how the communication tensions arising in Marla and Judy’s households, like all the families interviewed, revolved around the deaf sibling’s access to family chatter. As trivial or profound it may be, effective communicating is at a greater risk compared to deaf-to-deaf or hearing-to-hearing sibling interactions. What could siblings do to minimize the risks of miscommunication? The only tools any of the siblings had as children were whatever speech and lipreading training skills they acquired at their early education sites. Prior to 1880, the language of instruction in schools for the deaf throughout the United States was ASL. However, a movement to teach deaf children using only speech and lipreading, called the oral method, pervaded America and Europe after the late 1800s.
During the mid-sixties, most schools for the deaf used oral methods of instruction, where sign was prohibited in the classrooms. Judy, a graduate of Columbia University teacher preparation program, did not anticipate the communication challenges she would face, even after having met deaf people through her brother. However, behind closed classroom doors, many teachers used ASL, Sign, gestures or any other visual communication with these deaf children. Judy, like many of her hearing colleagues, was not prepared at her first teaching job at the New York School for the Deaf (Fanwood). Scrambling to communicate with her students, she discovered bartering, where she taught academic subjects while her students fed her ASL vocabulary, the tool she needed to do her job. As a result of using oral instruction or bartering, nationwide rampant illiteracy of deaf students became the norm. Back in 1976, a report by New York University’s Deafness Research and Training Center stated, “Deaf adults generally are characterized by depressed reading levels, with the average 18-year-old deaf student reading at the fifth grade level (Schein, et al. 1976, 17).
However, many current education reports have indicated the persistent illiteracy is also compounded by failure of effective communication in the home.
… two of the best predictors of deaf students’ academic achievement are parents’ acceptance of their child’s hearing loss and their having high expectations for their children. These two attitudes may be more frequent in deaf parents than hearing parents, but they need not be. Involvement in their children’s learning and effective parent-child communication are what is important [Marschark and Hauser, 2012, 84].
As a sibling, Judy was forced to choose between her love for teaching and finding a place that supported ASL.
My professional work in deaf education haunted me. I had loved the deaf kids at Fanwood but I couldn’t go back there. I just couldn’t bear the hypocrisy of the system. Yet, my interest in sign continued: With a friend whose parents were deaf, I trekked into New York to take ASL classes. Each time I saw Larry and Carolyn at family gatherings, I was eager to use my new Sign skills with them.
For ten years, while attending public schools, Marla knew there was a language that belonged to the deaf.
ASL changed my life. It wasn’t considered or ever used in my household. I was fifteen years old when I befriended deaf teenagers at a Deaf Teen club; there I was able to retrieve my memory of Sign and use what I learned from my hearing itinerant teachers.
Although Judy’s sister, Mary Ann, their parents and other relatives continued to communicate with Larry and his wife Carolyn through speech and lipreading, Judy had chosen a different path:
When I began Signing with my brother and his deaf wife, no one in the family objected or even commented about it. Sign just became part of our lives and was the way we talked.
In contrast, Marla’s family mocked her when she first started signing at home:
We don’t understand you. Please put your hands underneath your butt. This is ridiculous. Use your voice to speak to us.
High school and college are the places where young adults begin to cement their identities and where peer influence becomes paramount. It is also the beginning of a gradual search for clarity in the degree of closeness with their siblings. Even as a teenager, Marla was intrigued by her deaf friends’ stories about their hearing siblings.
Some of my deaf friends saw their hearing siblings as their best friends while others cringed. For years I was obsessed with trying to understand what made it possible for these deaf and hearing siblings to be close.
By the mid–1970s, ASL was gaining recognition as a language, with its own syntax and grammar. Judy’s years of increased Sign may have strengthened her bonds to her deaf family members; however, her Signing remained at a plateau level of English word order with missed concepts that a syntax and grammar would provide. By studying with a deaf professional and a native speaker of ASL, Judy uncovered a tipping point:
My first class with Eileen changed my life. She taught the class without voice, forcing me to focus on ASL and not hear any spoken English. I felt like she had taken over my body. She made me aware, for the first time, that deaf people had a culture, a literature, a different set of values and experiences from my world—the hearing world.
Eileen Forestal, who coordinated the Interpreter Training Program at Union County College, used many tools: she showed videotapes of deaf adults using ASL. Through ASL stories and ASL poetry, deaf adults described how demeaned and frustrated they were at oral schools, detailing their loneliness in their hearing families where family members did not sign. Hilarious stories of their dormitory lives, where the deaf students were free to use ASL, showed yet another side—comedians, serious performers and storytellers. Eileen was not only an inspiration to Judy; she was a pioneer introducing the field of ASL instruction and ASL interpreting as a career, especially to deaf professionals like Marla. Since 2009, as the fourth most popular language among the universities’ enrollments according to the Modern Language Association (MLA), ASL earned the recognition not only as a language belonging to the deaf, but a language deserving of study in its own right, like Spanish, French or German (Modern Language Association Press Release 2010). Deaf people began to work in an emerging profession as ASL interpreters, specifically as Deaf Interpreters, earning a national certification awarded by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID). Their interpreting work presented ASL’s authenticity: “In addition to proficient communication skills and general interpreter training, the CDI has specialized training and/or experience in the use of gesture, mime, props, drawings and other tools to enhance communication” (Code of Professional Conduct n.d.).
Marla’s experience as a Certified Deaf Interpreter (CDI) in various settings such as Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings in mainstreamed and residential deaf settings, medical and mental health settings, business meetings, local, state and international conferences and civil and criminal courts have endorsed how ASL as a language can be as productive as any other language in making a difference in people’s lives in large or small ways. In the world of ASL users and non–ASL users, Marla’s lifetime work mentoring her students, colleagues, and advising families has been steadfast with this thought:
When talking about ourselves, the world and anything in between we choose to discuss, whether important or trivial, there is this secret weapon: The ability to transform ideas into practical realities—whether you’re deaf or hearing—makes ASL compelling and irresistible, putting emotions and ideas out there, all at the same time.
Judy’s exposure to the DEAF-WORLD led her to heightened awareness of the juxtaposition of her relationships with her siblings, Larry and Mary Ann, one being deaf and the other hearing.
Though I had deaf family members and had worked with deaf children and adults for close to fifteen years, I hadn’t even realized there were two worlds: Deaf and Hearing. Eileen told us: “Once you’ve learned ASL, you can never go back. You become a member of the deaf community.” As I examined my identity as a sibling of a deaf adult, I began to wonder what impact my becoming part of the DEAF-WORLD might have had on my relationships with my deaf and hearing family members.
Relationships between deaf and hearing siblings force us to recognize there is an existence of a DEAF-WORLD separate from the hearing world, though they co-exist. The moment a newborn baby is deaf, or at whatever age the confirmation is made, unquestionably the family is forever changed. What does a parent think about the deaf child? More specifically, how does the parents’ way of thinking about their deaf children affect how children think about themselves?
Stating that parents need to accept the deaf or hard-of-hearing child is an overly simplistic mantra without clear-cut operational descriptions of how acceptance is manifested throughout various family life events. Each developmental window, starting with identification of the hearing difference and proceeding through linguistic and psychosocial development levels, lends itself to influences that will affect identity development; this depends greatly on how families experience the hearing difference (Pollard 2004). The child’s individual characteristics (temperament, cognitive abilities, personality, communication responsiveness, etc.) will also influence how the hearing difference is treated within the family context and beyond (Harvey, 2003) [I. Leigh 2009, 68].
These vignettes warn us not to underestimate the power of parents’ words and actions on their children’s lives. What goes through the mind of the siblings we interviewed as these words echo?
Gavin: My father was sitting there and a man walked by and spoke to me. My father looked to the man and said, “I am sorry, he has a hearing problem.” So, I suspected my sisters had the same feeling. There is something wrong with me. Something was missing. I was a defective.
Darcy: You know, it just makes me think how … lucky I am. How fortunate my brother and I have been in a family where my mom learned to sign and my aunt wanted to learn, and she did.
Newman: They had a deaf child and they had to figure out a way to cope with that. Cued Speech is great … it can teach him how to speak. He can do this. He can learn how to communicate better.
Chad: They discouraged the use of sign; they encouraged lip reading and my mother became a very good lipreader and she preferred that I communicate with her by talking and she had no difficulty reading my lips. My brother is a good lipreader too. We never signed.
If the deaf child is cast in a role set by the parents, does this mean siblings are destined to continue to live by their parents’ model throughout their lives? Or are deaf and hearing siblings free to be themselves beyond their parents’ beliefs and attitudes? Since in most families, parents are the first role models, the adoption of attitudes, beliefs, and morals internalized by siblings toward the existence of the family members who are deaf come with mixed messages—they are one of us but they are also not one of us.
The but implies something’s happening in the family that isn’t normal. Dale Atkins, a psychologist who did early work on siblings of deaf children, had parents asking, “‘When will things be back to normal?’ Since this never happens, the task is to create an environment for family members to discover a new version of normal. Life is different now” (Atkins 1987). What defines normalcy? Change is evident, but what is described as normal to one family member may not be shared by others. Although siblings may live and grow up in a household with the same set of one or more parents, each sibling’s experience is unique and varies depending on how their roles evolve within the family.
The brunt of describing a deaf sibling hit home when a psychologist interviewed a nine-year-old bluntly describing her perception of her undesirable sibling:
Dr. Carden: I heard you have a “special” sister. Is that true?
Jennifer: Yes, she’s special but it’s not a good special. It’s a sad special. It’s not nice to be deaf. Sometimes it feels like I’m having a bad dream and I’ll wake up and my sister won’t be deaf. We have to sign all the time and sometimes we forget. It’s hard. We have to learn so much [Sibling Interviews 1982].
Indeed, several individuals have acquired perspectives of their identity in the context of being a sibling of a deaf or hearing person. The examples from the vignettes show some deaf siblings are still wrestling with their hearing siblings’ perception of them not as a whole person. Others have siblings who say their deaf sibling is the one who has adapt: the world is a hearing place, and that they see no reason to take on the attributes of the DEAF-WORLD. And finally, even some hearing siblings with deaf parents accepted society’s view that spoken language is the only acceptable modality for communication, and chose not to sign with their parents or deaf siblings in the home. Discovering identity is derived from siblings’ interplay, yet what masks the siblings’ ability to look at one another as equals is the stigma hovering in the background. How can siblings be honest with one another in their interactions when there are so many unresolved issues: what language to use, attitudes towards being deaf, unlevel playing fields in everyday settings, among other potential factors invading the psyche toward a child or a sibling who is not one of them?
Studying sibling relationships gives us a framework for how healthy families interact with one another. In families, healthy family functioning stems from the harmony of their shared family experience. If both siblings are on the same page, through conversations, they have a better chance of moving to a healthier place in their relationship: “Clear communication is by far the most important attribute of the optimally functioning family” (Luterman and Ross 1991, 55). So what does clear communication look like in order to create harmony? As expected, parents model the way healthy families resolve conflicts and foster change and growth. Another key component of clear communication is the language necessary to identify emotions interfering with family harmony. For example, a mother would say, “Amy, you are crying because you feel hurt that your friend did not play with you.” Or a brother would say to his sister, “I am furious at you because you did not give me back my favorite Gameboy.” Since parents and children bring their own unique qualities and characteristics to the family system, each also brings diverse interests. Negotiation skills are also utilized to ensure resolution of the natural conflict arising within families because “It is not the presence of conflict in a family that determines its health but rather how conflicts are resolved” (Luterman 59).