Keeping ASL in the Deaf/Hearing home

I was doing research on the Internet for my deaf parenting book. I came across a certain blog post and it really hit home.

Here is the link:http://medeafyes.com/?p=13

The reason why this hit home?

Because, lately, Jennifer has reported she can't remember how to sign certain letters and words. My fault because, for a long time, we have not used sign language as often as we used to.

In fact, we hardly use it with her AT ALL anymore. And she's remembering the signs less and less every day that she doesn't use them.

I realized this while working on the edits for that book. One essay talks about how we ALWAYS use ASL in communicating with her. Our child MAY be hearing but she DOES need to know how to sign, because she has deaf parents. She will need to know how to sign so that she can communicate with us without trouble. And as I read that essay, I realized we don't use it as much anymore. But we should. We really should use sign language as much as possible again. Because, obviously, she will forget how to sign if we don't keep it up.

When I read that blog post, along with some of the comments, I called Jennifer over to me and asked her to sign the alphabet.

She got stuck on the letter "B." Now how sad IS that??

So I signed to her the alphabet and asked her to show me again. This time, she signed it without trouble. But how well will she remember those signs tomorrow or the next day? I know I have to reintegrate ASL into our communication with Jennifer and KEEP AT IT. Just as I learned ASL better when it was used more frequently with others at my school, my child can learn it the same way. I may not be able to sign all the signs so well on account of my hand injury, but I'll figure something out.

At least now I know how important it is to keep ASL a part of our everyday communication. I guess I just went back to relying on lipreading because I took it for granted that she can hear. She'll benefit immensely if she'll know how to sign to communicate with her deaf Mom and Dad. We all will.