Nursery World - A Unique Child: Working with parents

The needs of parents who are deaf and their children who can hear tend to be overlooked by the early years sector. But there are examples of good practice out there, as Mary Evans has discovered

Deaf parents of hearing children often feel their families' needs are overlooked by early years practitioners who fail to build strong communications between home and the setting, but there is much to be learned from the best of current practice.

There are no precise statistics for the number of deaf adults with hearing children but by extrapolating the figures from a Department of Health survey, Sabina Iqbal, founder and chair of Deaf Parenting UK, reckons there are 15,000-25,000 deaf parents with a dependant child in the UK.

She says the experience of her family is typical. 'We felt that it was vital for Samaira, our first child, to start nursery as early as ten months to aid her language development. We asked social services to assist us with funding but they refused, saying that Samaira was not a "child in need".

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