What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know | Page 4

however, the specialists are uncertain of the outcome, and sometimes their hopes are not realized. In the meantime, precious days and weeks are passing in which something could be done for the little one educationally, without in any way interfering with the medical efforts at relief. The two things can be, and should be, carried on simultaneously. If normal hearing is restored no harm has been done by the educational training; in fact, the development of the child has been advanced. On the other hand, if the hopes that were entertained are disappointed, then precious and irrecoverable time has not been lost.
The title presupposes that the mother has already accepted the fact that her child's hearing is not perfect, and, for the sake of the child, it is to be hoped that this knowledge came to her very promptly after the occurrence of the deafness.
One would naturally expect a mother, of her own accord, to carefully test all the senses of her child by many simple and repeated exercises during the first few months of its life. The many cases, however, in which deafness on the part of a child has not been recognized, or at least not acknowledged, by the mother till the third, fourth, or even fifth year, show a strange neglect of a highly desirable investigation, and a natural unwillingness to accept a truth, the possibility of which must certainly have occurred to her long before.
If she could only realize that she need not feel downcast and heavy-hearted by reason of her little one's imperfect hearing; if she could only know that she need not look forward to a life for him different from that of other children; if she could understand that training and education can enable him to overcome to an extraordinary degree the disadvantage of deafness, she would set about the task with cheerfulness and hope, and if she knew that the sooner she began, the better it would be for the little one, she would not stubbornly refuse for so long to acknowledge even the possibility of deafness.

II
HOW SHALL THE MOTHER BEGIN HER PART OF THE WORK?
First of all, something like an inventory should be taken of the faculties possessed by the child which he can use in working out his problem. Has he good sight, normal smell, taste, muscular sense, and memory? To what extent is his hearing impaired? Is there any possibility of restoring it to normal acuteness, or of improving it, or of preventing any further impairment?
The completeness with which these questions can be answered depends, to a considerable extent, on his age and his physical condition. We will suppose that he is about fifteen months old and in good bodily condition. If he is older, the same tests would be used to begin with, though we could at once pass on to more complicated and difficult ones that cannot as yet be used with the fifteen-months-old baby.
First, with regard to sight. We wish to know if he can distinguish reasonably small objects at reasonable distances; whether he can see moderately small things at short distances; whether the angle of his vision is normal. In other words, whether his range and angle of vision are sufficient for all ordinary purposes.
If he can recognize his father or mother or brothers and sisters at a distance of a hundred feet he can see far enough for all practical purposes. If he readily finds a small object like a pin or a small black bead when dropped on the floor, his sight is sharp enough at short range to serve his purposes. If his attention can be attracted by waving a hand or a little flag or a flower fifty or sixty degrees on either side of the direction in which he is looking, that is, two-thirds of the way to the side of his head, his angle of vision is sufficiently wide. If he can pick out from seven balls of worsted of the seven primary colors--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet--the ball that matches another of the same color, he is at least not color-blind and has a sufficient sense of color for the ordinary purposes of life. It may be necessary to wait till eighteen months for a satisfactory color test. Color blindness, when present, is usually most apparent in a failure to distinguish between red and green, these two widely differing colors seeming to produce the same impression upon the color-blind eye. The child will be just as likely to choose a red ball to match the green one in his hand as to select another red ball. But repeated tests should be made before accepting color blindness as a fact, since sometimes the brain can be educated to discriminate between red and green even when the