"I will never forget the day we were told that our daughter, who was one day old, had passed the
auditory
streaming
favorably
," says Clara Hernández, 37, who is one of the 1,064,000 people who have a hearing disability, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE) in Spain.
In the case of her family, she and her husband are deaf and her children are hearing.
Hernández uses a cochlear implant in one ear and a hearing aid in the other, so they have learned to communicate with their children using oral language.
In Spain, only 3% of deaf people use sign language, according to the INE.
More information
Being the parent of a child with a disability: "Life is not what we dream of, but what we feel"
No Instruction Manual: Learning to Parent a Child with a Disability
At bedtime, Hernández has taught his children that if they need something at night they have to get up and go to their parents' bed, they cannot just scream or cry because surely their parents will have already removed their hearing aids and not they can hear them. “Vibrating baby monitors have been a vital help to us. They have the ability to activate when a sound is heard. The first few days, we had the baby monitor running with high sensitivity, for fear that it would not vibrate. But it was activated at the slightest noise! He caught any movement, turning around or coughing a little. So little by little we learned to regulate the sensitivity for the sake of our rest, it vibrated when I really cried ”, affirms Hernández. Today there are mobile applications that do the same function.Technology has advanced so much that there are even
apps
that, depending on the type of crying, tell you why your baby is crying: hunger, sleepiness or pain.
Now his children Lucía, five years old, and Martín, three, are also aware, for example, of when their parents do not wear hearing aids;
you have to call them with physical contact and then address them by looking at them and vocalizing.
“We have found ourselves in compromised situations where our eldest daughter has had to act as an intermediary.
Once we were locked in an elevator, where Lucía was telling us what the telecare service staff were saying ”, this mother confesses.
Hernández is a psychopedagogue and counselor for families of children with hearing disabilities, so she has never feared what would happen if her children were deaf. "We were very clear that our children were going to go to a school where they could live with deaf classmates and know from a very young age how to deal with them naturally and, therefore, with us," explains Hernández.
Being parents is a challenge. If, in addition, a family member has a hearing impairment, the challenge is greater. “Now when we accompany our children to the park or to extracurricular activities, we can hardly relate to their friends or their families. If, for example, I want to teach the little one how to play a game with a child who is in the park, in other circumstances I would have approached the child and taken the initiative for my child to take me as an example. I myself realize that I no longer relate as much as I used to because of the fear of not understanding the other person, ”says Hernández.
This fear of which you speak is due to the masks. Since the pandemic arrived, the way of communicating has been greatly affected by this barrier that does not allow our lips to be read. “Its use has made a very significant change in our lives. Despite being a user of cochlear implants for a few years, I need facial lip reading ”, denounces Hernández.
This same feeling is felt by Raquel Puebla, 40, who affirms that the pandemic has had a brutal impact on the way in which she relates. "I am profoundly deaf and for me lip reading is essential and with the masks I cannot read lips, which has had a very negative impact on direct communication with people." For example, the other day he had a parent meeting for Zoom that he had to walk out of because he didn't understand anything they were saying. “My social life has been seriously affected. So if parents are role models for their children, mine is not going to see me socialize in a normal way, ”says Puebla, who is the mother of one-year-old Mateo. “I try to lead a life as normalized as possible because the childhood of children is now and it does not come back and you have to try to enjoy it to the fullest.I trust and hope that this pandemic situation will end one day, ”says Puebla, who uses a vibrating bracelet that alerts him when the child cries. And during the day, he uses a baby monitor with a video camera and vibration to let him know if he needs it.
The Spanish Confederation of Families of Deaf People (FIAPAS) has been the speaker to society of the problems that deaf people are having with the pandemic. Carmen Jáudenes, director of FIAPAS, denounces that distance education has been carried out without resources to support hearing and on many occasions there has not been available audiovisual information on the accessible health emergency. “It is important that they know that there are support structures created by the families themselves and directed at them. It is very important that we complain and not settle for the situation we are experiencing, ”says Jáudenes. "We have to fight for our rights, especially those of deaf children and make our collective visible, so that society becomes aware of the struggle we are waging," he concludes.
You can follow De mamas & de papas on
,
or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
.