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Read the full transcript here

Today on the All About Audiology Podcast, Dr. Saperstein speaks with Tara Marie from We Can Sign. Tara shares her story with different educational settings. When she attended a Deaf School, she felt she was able to finally flourish in an environment that felt right for her. In this academic setting, Tara was able to access sports, participate in tournaments, travel, and even become the student body president during her senior year. She has been teaching sign language for roughly 20 years, and holds online educational sessions. Tune into the powerful story and inspiring perspective that Tara brings to the table all from her own life story. 

This week on the All About Audiology podcast:  

2:30 – Individuals with hearing loss can be successful; specialists should not undermine the potential of their patients 

7:30 – To disclose or not to disclose one’s hearing loss is up to each individual. It is important to balance the pros and cons depending on the situation one finds themself in

12:30 – Children who are hard of hearing are diminished when the adults in their life try to make them function, look, and act as normal as possible

15:00 – If that child feels positive about their future, if they feel good about themselves, if they have support from their peers and adults, they will be much better off.

16:00 – Tara finds that spending time with her friends who also have hearing loss, fuels her.

19:00 –  Tara says that since children with hearing loss do not have 100% access to hearing, relaying on both a CI and ASL gives a child holistic access to communication.

26:00 – Going from knowing what hearing should sound like and then transferring to hearing sound through a cochlear implant, may not initially be a positive experience

32:00- If the batteries of a CI die, Tara finds that it has always been helpful to have sign language in her back pocket in order to shift as per needed.

For more resources and research visit:
All About Audiology Website 
All About Audiology Facebook group  
All About Audiology Instagram

And the Prodana pay-it-forward platform here: https://prodana.org/practioner/lilach-saperstein/audiology-counseling–dr–lilach-saperstein

(Guest Links)
https://www.wecansign.com/with-tara.html
https://www.facebook.com/signingforeveryone/
https://www.instagram.com/wecansign/
https://www.wecansign.com/contact.html

Mentioned in this episode:
-Brene Brown
-Idaho Educational Services for the Dead and the Blind

Listen Next/Related Episodes
–All About Believing in Your Child- Episode 51 with Chaya Klughaupt


Transcript:

[DR. LILACH SAPERSTEIN]
Welcome back to the All About Audiology Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein. I’m an audiologist and a parenting coach focusing on the relationship and the connections that we have with those amazing and important children in our lives that happen to also be hard of hearing or deaf, and so, we are really excited to welcome you to this episode today.
And we’re going to be speaking with Tara Marie from ASL Expressions, and we’re going to be talking about how using American Sign Language or any sign language can be a really huge and important part of your journey. So welcome, Tara. Thank you for coming on the show.

[TARA MARIE]
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. I am doing very well. Thank you. The sun is out. Spring is starting to peak up.

[LS]
We all need a little bit of falling out for sure. We’re done with this winter. I’d love to hear more about your journey, your background, and I know we have a lot of parents who are listening that might really feel overwhelmed and scared and nervous, and there’s so much information on the internet. Everyone has so many opinions. So where did you come into all of this?

[TM]
When I was about three, my mom started to notice that I was missing things that I had heard before but wasn’t responding to, and so she took me to our pediatrician and said, “I think she might be losing her hearing.” So he said, “Oh, let me talk with her,” and so, he had me come up and we had a conversation and I was very chatty. I was not shy, and just very engaged. And obviously, we were in a one-on-one situation so I did just fine, and the doctor looked at my mom and he just laughed, and he said, “She does not have a hearing loss.” He said, “She has selective hearing or mother deafness. So basically, she’s ignoring you.”

[LS]
The amount that my eyes are rolling. They cannot go any higher.

[TM]
I know. It’s crazy, and it’s funny because that happened a couple more times. She finally went to a different doctor—somebody that was a specialist and they found easily that I did indeed have a hearing loss, and from the testing, they found that it would most likely be a very progressive loss and that I would eventually lose all of my hearing. So my mom’s—she starts getting emotional. Tears start rolling, and the doctor—he pats her on the back and he says, “It’s okay, Janet. I know this is devastating news. I’m going to be honest with you. It’s very likely she probably will not graduate from high school, but she’s a cute little thing and she’ll be okay, and just do the best that you can,” and my mother—those tears stopped immediately and her emotion changed to anger, and she says, “You cannot tell me that this bright little girl is not going to graduate from high school, just because she loses her hearing,” and that was it. That was unacceptable to her, and I am so thankful that it was unacceptable to her. Really.
I was the oldest of six children, but it was so important to my parents that my hearing loss did not prevent me from access to the world. Something else that the doctor told my parents—I know that it’s an opinion, that’s widely circulated, but I disagree with it—but the doctor told my parents, “Don’t sign with her. If you sign with her, she’ll stop talking.”
I already had excellent speech, but they suggested that by adding sign language, that I would stopped talking, but also he told her that I would eventually be completely deaf, and this was before cochlear implants were even a thing. So it was kind of interesting. And with that prediction, it’s kind of baffling to think, well, what was he expecting when I reached that point where I could no longer hear anything?
So, I didn’t learn sign language as a child, and it wasn’t until middle school that that got to be a problem. It was in middle school that my hearing just tanked—just very aggressively. Those were really rough times, even through adulthood, when I would drive past that middle school that I attended at that time in my life, I would still get a little bit of PTSD. It was a very traumatic time for me, and that was before masks. As a matter of fact, one of my children, I have two children that are hard of hearing. I had to pull him out of school and homeschool him this year because he’s not deaf enough to really use a sign language interpreter cause he can still hear the English at the same time, but he can’t hear well enough without reading lips, so he was so lost. 
So anyways, I can’t even imagine had there been masks back then—how much more difficult it would have been, but I mean, I would come home from school daily, just crying, just in tears. It was such a miserable time for me, and so finally, my parents decided to check into an option that they had been resisting for a long time, and that was the residential deaf school here in Idaho.
It’s in a very small town. There’s very little industry other than farming out there. So if a parent had a deaf child and wanted to move near the deaf school so that their child could be a day student, it would be very difficult for them to find work. The location is not ideal, so I would be sent away to school and I would live there during the week and come home on the weekends and holidays and summers, so that was very much a last resort for my parents, but we decided to go visit and just check out that option because we were really literally out of options there, and I needed to learn sign—like immediately.

[LS]
Can I ask you a question about your experience and not to poke at the pain because it’s so real—we talk about this a lot on the show that the things that happened to you in the past liv