Early Childhood

Sometimes I wish that I could step into a time machine and travel back to a time and place free from the chaos and worry that seems to have worked its way into my life. I still catch myself attempting to escape into my imagination in hopes of catching a glimpse of what it was like to have a completely different perspective on the world around me.

Being surrounded by young children makes mental time traveling a lot easier and far more exciting. I find it fascinating when a child opens up and lets you peek into their head, and after spending some time with the six year old daughter of a friend of mine, I was able to get a better picture of what it was that I have been struggling to remember. Mya, as she will be referred to, was a bit shy at first, but after a few minutes of playing around she came out of her shell and for a short time she allowed me to see the world from her point of view.

From having the initial conversation with her mother, I found out that Mya started out as a small girl and weighed six pounds and three ounces at birth, which has slightly more than quintupled in the last five years to thirty-two pounds, and her height which was twenty-one and a half inches at birth has doubled to forty-three inches, which keeps Mya as being a small girl.

The actual interview with Mya was extremely entertaining and I discovered that she isn’t what I would consider a typical six year old girl, her favorite foods include corn on the cob, fruit, tomatoes, and “dry” green beans. Her mother later explained that she only likes green beans fresh and won’t eat them if they are cooked in any way. Mya informed me that so far she has lost two teeth and when I asked her what she did before bed, she simply said “nothing”. I was able to find out that her bedtime is eight o’clock and she sleeps with a bear named Amy (subject to change at any given time). At bedtime Mya said that she was afraid when she has to sleep on the bottom bunk of her bed because she thinks someone is going to jump out from under the bed.

I was able to observe her gross and fine motor skills when I witnessed Mya writing, which is an example of fine motor skills, and she showed me how high she could jump which demonstrates her gross motor skills. She was also playing games with her little sister that further demonstrated her fine motor skills, and her interest in ballet expresses her ability to control her gross motor skills even better.

Moving on to the cognitive section of my observation/interview, I started out by asking Mya what she thinks that I would like for my birthday, to which she replied “a Webkinz!”. I also asked her if she could remember anything from a long time ago, and she said she remembers swimming at a hotel and also remembers going to Wal-Mart to get her pictures taken.

Originally, Mya told me that she was French when I asked her to describe herself to me, but she took it back and told me that she was Italian, she likes ballet, and she can do math. Throughout the entire interview I was assessing her language and was very impressed with her articulation and rather extensive vocabulary. During the three concept of conservation experiments, Mya was able to distinguish between the two rows of skittles but counting them out, and wasn’t fooled when I spread out one of the rows. She did, however, tell me that the Play-Doh that was rolled out into a “cylinder” as she called it, had more, as well as the tall glass of Bug Juice had more that the shallow bowl of the same liquid.

When I started the psychosocial part of the interview by asking Mya to tell me how she tells the difference between boys and girls, to which she replied “Boys do cooler stuff, like jump off swings, and boys have different colored eyes. Boys have short hair and girls have long hair.” Mya also told me that mommies take you to school, get you food, and push you on the swings, and daddies take you outside and play with your Barbie guitar, and color with you.

As far as temperament goes, I would say that Mya has an easy temperament, because she was interested in our interview and her mom informed me that she is very social, very adaptable, and not afraid to try new things. When she was telling me about her friends, Mya told me that they were funny, and they like to play Hannah Montana together at recess, which she also described as one of her favorite things to play, along with Uno and Checkers. Playing her guitar, playing the piano and playing with Play-Doh were among her favorite things to do.

Mya told me that she could “build stuff, like towers out of blocks”, when I asked her what kind of things she could do, and that iCarly, Drake and Josh, SpongeBob, Wonder Pets, and Hannah Montana were her favorite things to watch on TV, even though her mom doesn’t like her watching iCarly because they have boyfriends.

When it comes to her parenting style, Mya’s mother is a combination of permissive and authoritative, and when I asked Mya how she was punished when she was in trouble, she told me that she gets sent to her room and sometimes gets grounded and spanked.

The observation/interview ended with Mya’s mom and me talking about her responses, and how initially I was interviewing Mya’s little sister, but she was too busy playing dress-up and running off to her bedroom to change her costume. As we were sitting there chuckling about Mya and her sister’s responses to my questions, I felt a little tap on my back. I turned around, and there was Mya, with a pencil in one hand and a pad of paper in the other. With a very inquisitive look on her face, Mya climbed into the chair next to me and asked me “Angel, what is your favorite food?” I laughed hysterically as I answered her questions. After all, she was patient enough to let me interview her; I guess it was her turn now to do the interviewing.

The Deaf Adult

For a class in school I had to read a section in our text. I was particularly interested in the comparison that a specific poem had made to the education of Deaf children to people living near a community continuously falling over a cliff. Rather than put up a fence to prevent anymore people from falling off of the cliff in the future, the people of the valley just set up an ambulance at the bottom to take proper care of them after they had fallen. The comparison to the education of Deaf children, to me, was that instead of focusing on the student’s ability to learn and making sure that the students had proper education in the first place, they prepared for how to handle the situation when the education system fails them.

The focus on education for students with hearing loss seems to circle around just a basic education, and not taking the time to consider the individual needs of each child as far as learning goes. Deaf adults are trying to reach out and let hearing parent’s know how it was for them growing up, and what they would liked to have when they were being educated.

I wasn’t very impressed with the idea of parents just tossing their deaf children into a “sea of knowledge and let him sink or swim”. I personally feel that every student, no matter what type of alternate arrangements are made, should be given the equal opportunity to achieve the same results as their peers. If a student needs more attention than that of another student, with or without the same circumstantial setbacks, they should be given enough floatation devices necessary to accomplish whatever goals they set for themselves. I definitely don’t think a hypothetical life raft should be thrown out to them, but just enough assistance to make students feel like they achieved their goals, and give them incentive to keep on pushing forward and setting new goals. In an attempt to keep up with the same line of analogies, why not allow the use of floatation devices, paired along with swimming lessons to teach these students how to do these same tasks by themselves. Who knows, eventually they may not even need the floatation devices at all.

Every person handles circumstances in their life differently from one another, and some people, hearing or deaf, need a hand or even just someone to take the time out to show them the ropes. Who would know how someone is going to handle something better that someone who is going through the same things. All they are asking for is for people to take the time and communicate with them, listen to what they are saying, and take their opinions and points of view into consideration.