The trouble began when relationships started to revolve around discussions and spoken exchanges. I am uncomfortable in group discussions, even in friendly get-togethers. Given what we now know about academic, career, and social success of Deaf people, a paradigm shift is in order. The importance of perfecting a child's auditory discrimination or pronunciation is viewed in the context of the whole child's development. Parents I have met in such settings place a very high value on literacy and grade-level academic achievement, and felt that time and energy put into intensive speech training must be weighed realistically against the potential benefits.
Some children benefit greatly from time spent in training, in terms of usable skills.
Others benefit only minimally in their prognosis for usable speech. They were not willing to put learning, socialization, and language on hold or require that their child fail with spoken language before being given opportunities for exposure to Deaf adults and fully accessible visual language. This does not imply that we stop trying to increase our understanding of how Deaf children can best learn to speak, or that we deny them opportunities for exposure to spoken language input. Rather, these conclusions suggest that our approaches to deaf infants and toddlers must take into account some long-standing facts about the real possibilities for the average deaf child to develop intelligible speech and use it as a primary mode of communication for academic, social, and later for career purposes. There is a great deal to be learned about what makes some deaf children's speech more intelligible than others, and what factors would enable us to predict whether or not a child will become an intelligible speaker, with or without amplification and intensive training.