DEAF Peers?

We are preparing for Miss Kat to attend a week-long church camp for teens in Utah this summer.  This program has several classes where she will study the scriptures and hear from religious professionals, researchers, and motivational speakers. She will be with hundreds of other LDS youth, in huge classrooms (it is held at BYU) and will be a great learning and spiritual experience.

There are 24 sessions available but one of them boasts of being "ASL Accommodated". I asked Miss Kat if she would like to attend that session. While she would not use the interpreters, she would have other d/Deaf youth in her group. There would be other kids with CIs there and she could have the chance to bond with them and interact with more teens with hearing loss. She said that she would rather not. She said that the pressure of using an interpreter to communicate with them, struggling for them to lipread her or use a few signs and gestures and her attempting to use her CI to understand their non-typical speech just would take away from her experience. She said it is more stressful to be in those situations and that she just relates better and communicates more easily with people with typical hearing.

That is HER opinion and HER choice. At nearly 16 years old, I will continue to offer her these opportunities, but I will default to her comfort and choice.

(Miss Kat will be using her FM and live captioning for the large "lecture hall" type classes and just her CIs for everyday communication.)