Hey y’all,
I recently did a presentation about social and emotional skills development, specific to deaf and hard of hearing children and teens. I’ve included the powerpoint that I used for the presentation below. I pulled information from multiple sources, which I included, and also put some helpful videos into the presentation. Feel free to use it!
To boil the presentation down to its core ideas, the most effective parenting style is what we call authoritative. This style encourages interactions with children, explaining rules and boundaries when appropriate, and high expectations of children tempered with love and more positive feedback than negative. I hit up parenting styles and explained outcomes of those styles first because parents are the shapers of their children’s personalities, for the large part. Parents are the ones who affect and influence their children’s life-long beliefs about the world, who they are, and just how much they can expect to trust others.
I mentioned possible challenges with parenting, especially specific to parents with deaf or hard-of-hearing children. The big three issues that I saw in my years of working with deaf and hard-of-hearing children, teens, and adults has been communication difficulties, disconnected relationships, and poor self-concept. I assume that most people would consider these self-explanatory, so I really aimed at including specific techniques that parents and professionals can immediately use and start to build those skills in their child through modeling and other means.
Non-specific to deaf and hard-of-hearing children are five core areas of social and emotional growth that are important for parents and professionals to address. Again, I’ve included specific interventions, and I also included links to the websites whose materials I drew from and links to related videos. I hope this is helpful for you all. If you have any questions about this material or the presentation, feel free to comment below.