Most people from both communities are born to parents in the majority group (hearing and straight). Parents have dreams of what their ideal child would look like. The ideal child would be hearing and straight, who would grow up to be educated, musically-inclined, and articulate in a dominant spoken language, and walk down the church aisle in a traditional heterosexual wedding and produce children of the same. In other words: normal as defined by the majority in medical and societal terms.

When that dream is shattered upon the discovery that the child is either gay or Deaf, parent reactions vary from mild acceptance to outright grief and denial. It is the latter that seems to be the most common reaction. Self-blame and fear of rejection by family, friends, and religious/social groups, especially those with non-western cultural backgrounds are often intertwined with the grief and denial. For those parents who grieve, there are stages before acceptance occurs. For the purposes of comparison, the grief and denial stages will be discussed here.

In the case of the GLBT, this often meant there is hope that homosexuality is just a phase to be grown out of. Sometimes parents go to church or temples and pray for a miracle to occur so that their child would be straight again. There is the perception that homosexuality is a reversible condition, and that it is just an issue of morality that could be resolved. Once this condition is reversed, the child would fit into hetero-centric society better. To read further on what the parents experience, scroll down the article to this question: What Do the Parents of Gay Men/Lesbian/Bisexuals experience.

Parents of Deaf children go through grief and denial, too. Jamie Berke posted an article discussing parental reactions to the discovery of their child’s hearing loss. A website on “hearing-challenged sector” posted a post on family reactions. It’s worth reading, just so you get a sense of what parents of Deaf children experience when they learn their children’s diagnoses. In this article, one mother stated:

“I found it hard to believe, then I thought she’d be a deaf child but she’ll be able to hear later and just go deaf when she was old-like people often do. Even now, when I know she is profoundly deaf and she will always be, there is a little voice somewhere in my head saying perhaps she will hear again. None of my friends or family believed she was deaf.”

It is this hope that their children would hear that impels parents to search for treatments to “treat hearing loss and deafness”. For examples of treatments and procedures, check out the Stanford Wellsphere website . Confusing options are explored, with the CI and AVT-only option currently being the most popular choice. Before the advent of CI technology, Deaf children were often taken to church in the hopes that they would be miraculously healed through prayers. Sometimes they were taken to foreign countries like China to undergo alternative medical approaches such as acupuncture to try and heal the “broken ears”. It is often the parental dream that the Deaf child would one day be able to hear sounds and music, and speak articulately because this ability would help their child fit into audio-centric society.

It should be noted that although there are parallels between the reactions of parents towards their discovery of their children’s respective conditions, there is one important distinction between the two groups. Deaf children often don’t get to see their parents’ initial reactions because they were often infants or toddlers at the time of discovery whereas Gay children tend to be much older when their parents discover their orientation. Deaf adults could only infer as to the intensity of their parents’ initial reaction, but Gay adults often bear the scars of witnessing their parents’ initial reaction.

(BLOGGER’S NOTE: There was some difficulty in posting this particular part of my  series to DeafRead, so I had to delete this post and re-publish out of sequence.)