Plea for deaf children to be accepted

Press, 5 June 1979, Page 7

Plea for deaf children to be accepted

Deaf children could be integrated into “normal” schools only when society had accepted all of its disabled, the editor of “Talk,” the journal of the British National Deaf Children’s Society (Mrs Freddy Bloom) has said in Christchurch.

Integration was a beautiful word but it was meaningless unless a deaf child was accepted fully by all persons he came in contact with, said Mrs Bloom. Parents had to accept a deaf child as “a nice kid who just happens to be deaf.” A deaf child was not there to make life difficult. The mother of a deaf child herself, Mrs Bloom said that parents often felt guilty about having a child who could not hear. They needed help to overcome this guilt because it only added to the stress of having a deaf child in the family. A deaf child had to be accepted by neighbours, by schoolteachers, and especially by hearing children. Only then would the integration of deaf children into “normal”' schools work. The time for that had not arrived yet. But the job of educating deaf children to live in society could not be left to schools alone. It had to start with the parents, who needed good advisers from the beginning. Her first book, “Our Deaf Children,” was “the book I wished someone had written when I had Virginia and did not know anything about it." The book gave everyone in simple words and in not too many pages, an idea of the problems of deaf children.

Her second book, “The Boy Who Could Not Hear,” had been written to give hearing children an idea of what it was like to be deaf.

A journalist by profession, New York-born Mrs Bloom met her British husband, Dr Philip Bloom, in Singapore during World War IL Working as a nurse after the office of the “Tribune” newspaper had been bombed, Mrs Bloom was captured by the Japanese and spent three years and a half as a prisoner of war. She and her husband spent their honeymoon “in separate jails.” Mrs Bloom was released with a clean bill of health. Virginia Bloom was born deaf the next year. Her deafness was put down to a vitamin deficiency.

Mrs Bloom has no “professional” qualifications for her work with deaf children but she said that as editor of "Talk” for the last 23 years she had got to know her subject fairly well. She was chairman of the National Deaf Children’s Society from 1958 to 1966 and has been its vice-presi-dent since 1966. She is also governor of Moorfields Eye Hospital and chairman of the board of governors of the Inner London Educational Authority Special School, which caters for children suffering from hearing loss and some other handicap.

Mrs Bloom is in New Zealand as a guest of the Federation for Deaf Children for the “International Year of the Child.” She will speak at the Christchurch Teachers’ College today at 8 p.m.