Shout at your rattle and yowl: deaf babies aren’t quiet babies
What they don’t tell you about deaf babies is how much noise they make. baby3 might not hear much, but he makes sure we hear him. He squeaks, he squawks, he shouts; he yodels, he yells, he yowls. Even at 4 months, he’s superbly vocal. He sits there and chews his hands a bit, and then comes up with the most astonishing variety of noises, expressing delight or annoyance at his plastic toys, the sight of his mother, the sun coming through the window, anything.
And he modulates, too: sometimes it’s quiet cooing; other times it’s REALLY LOUD SHOUTS. Or yawls that whirl up the frequency spectrum. (We once had some friends visit who had a one-year-old child who could squeal at a frequency and volume that could stun you - literally. She used it as a weapon on her parents to get her way with things. After the first couple of squeals, you realised that you weren’t inclined to disagree, unless you were going to lock her in a soundproofed room.)
The noisiness is something you don’t consider after the deafness diagnosis. What you forget is that your baby doesn’t know he or she is deaf. They’ve still got the equipment to make noise, and they do. That says something profound, surely, about the human wish, desire, compulsion to communicate vocally. It’s so deeply ingrained that in retrospect the idea that deaf people were “mute” seems crazy.
It also makes it easy to understand how so many deaf babies could go undiagnosed for months or even years. When they’re this noisy and eager to talk, it doesn’t even cross your mind that they can’t hear anything. So many parents have simply thought that they have a placid baby. Instead, the reason the baby doesn’t wake up, or doesn’t wail at things you expect it to, is because it’s not being disturbed.
“Of course, they go silent after about eight months,” says our health visitor, regarding baby3 as he fixes her with a beady eye and lets out a yelp that modulates into a beseeching coo, “because they don’t get the feedback, so they give up.”
Well, we’re giving him all the feedback we can, because we like those crazy noises. Who cares if he’ll speak properly? Sometimes that’s overrated. Instead we grin, and nod our heads at his little explosions of pleasure, and he seems to think that’s feedback, and gives us more. We’ve recorded some of it. Maybe we should make it into a podcast. It’d be as meaningful as a fair number out there..
Plus, all the noise gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “dialogue of the deaf”.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- BBC programmes on deafness on 'Listen Again' (13 June 2005; score: 79.25%)
- 120 channels and everything on (12 April 2007; score: 72.54%)
- "Miracle babies" - another religion-based scam (14 November 2004; score: 66.65%)
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