Healthy child of parents with hearing difficulties – a new social work client group?

This article brings about the first results from empirical research targeting on the life experience of healthy children living with their deaf parents in the period of their dependency. Healthy child of parents with hearing... [ view full abstract ]

This article brings about the first results from empirical research targeting on the life experience of healthy children living with their deaf parents in the period of their dependency. Healthy child of parents with hearing difficulties grows up naturally as bilingual and this is what puts the child into the position of the native interpreter of the parents. This special situation is mainly determined by the culture and the language of the people with hearing difficulties and by the information barriers which stand between the deaf people and their social milieu.
The qualitative design with semi structured interview was chosen for the empirical research. The goal was to find out personal experience of the respondents with their attributed social role of the native interpreters into the sign language during their childhood. From the first results of the research we can mainly see that for the healthy children of parents with hearing difficulties it may be very difficult to interpret for their parents within the contact with offices. It is something inadequate to their age and social maturity. The empirical research also brings about some very interesting issues. For example – how the inappropriate form of burden that is put on the child´s shoulders from the parents can be connected with the form of the parents´ education. So far we can see that there are two groups of parents in this case. In the first one there are parents who joined educational institutions from the outside, they lived at home. In the other one there are parents who joined not only schools but also student hostels from their early childhood. This article also formulates the issues of possible ways of supporting families with deaf parents and healthy children in the process of solving problems named above.