"My Deaf Kid Connected Me With a Whole Deaf Community"

A conversation with Will Fertman, author of The Deaf Baby Instruction Manual

Hi readers,

I’m back from my latest book trip, out to Stanford last week. This was another special trip for me: Stanford is my alma mater, and it’s a place that’s still close to my heart.

I feel nostalgic whenever I’m in Northern California. The scenery, the rolling hills of the Bay, the smell of eucalyptus trees and ocean air… I got to spend a night on campus for the first time since college, and I also had time to see old friends, grab chai lattes from Coupa Cafe, stop by the Stanford Red Barn, visit one of the University’s ASL classes, and go on an evening hike with some fellow intrepid trekkers from the equestrian team.

I loved seeing how many people came out to the book event: some old professors of mine, one of my awesome college-era accommodations coordinators, several friends and teammates from the equestrian team (and our head coach!), a good group of current Stanford ASL and writing students, and many people from the local Deaf community, some of whom I’d met before. The shared curiosity in the room was energizing to me, as it always is.

Lindsey Dolich Felt, my moderator for this Stanford event, was also amazing: she’s another old friend of mine, who was doing her English PhD at Stanford back when I was a baby undergrad. Lindsey’s now an advanced lecturer in Stanford’s Program on Writing and Rhetoric, where she often teaches classes related to disability (her class this quarter is about nonverbal communication, which is very apt). She’s also deaf and a cochlear implant user, as well as one of my favorite people to chat with about writing and deafness. Her questions last week were so rich and thoughtful, I could have written a whole essay in response to each of them. I’m just glad we got the chance to debrief more personally later that night, when I stayed with her up in San Francisco!

I also enjoyed engaging with another group of smart and invested folks later in the weekend, when I joined the National ASL Teachers’ Association for a book club webinar on Sunday. The NASLTA has chosen Articulate as the first book for this book club series, which aims to uplift contemporary Deaf authors as well as develop more hands-on resources for ASL class curricula.

I had a great time chatting about my work with these ASL teachers from around the country, and now I’m looking forward to the ideas they come up with for incorporating this book into ASL classes for students of all different levels.

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All right, placing various newsy updates aside. Today, I’m excited to get back into my occasional newsletter Q&A series, for the first time since last summer. Life has felt a little scattered recently, even if in a good way, and I’m glad to use this space to keep spotlighting current cultural conversations about clear communication, access, and navigating the world.

Today’s Q&A is with Will Fertman, who’s a writer based in Northern California. He’s also the hearing dad of two sons, one of whom is deaf, as well as the author of the new book The Deaf Baby Instruction Manual.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Will in person this past fall in Berkeley, when I was in town for one of my book launch events at a local bookstore. During the Q&A portion, Will asked me a terrific question about how hearing parents can support and empower their deaf kids. Then, afterwards, we got to chat a little more when I went out for ice cream down the street with several Deaf and signing folks.

My new friend (and fellow writer) Rachel Zemach had also come to this Berkeley bookstore event, and I remember her telling me several times, “You have got to meet this awesome hearing dad I know!” She made sure that happened during our ice cream outing, and I’m very grateful.

As a side note, Rachel is her own force within contemporary conversations about the complications of the modern-day education system for DHH kids. (She also makes a brief appearance in my conversation with Will below.) If you’re interested in reading our Q&A from last year, check it out here:

Now, I’m so glad to have met Will in California, and I’m also so glad to see a hearing parent writing something hands-on for other hearing parents, all with care and attention for the Deaf community’s experiences and perspectives. Will and his wife have done what I (and many DHH people) wish more hearing parents would do: they’ve learned to sign with their deaf son, and they’ve also gotten very involved with their local Deaf community. This book provides practical information for hearing parents to use while raising a deaf child from birth through kindergarten, all while advocating for sign language access and being consistently smart and funny.

The Deaf Baby Instruction Manual is out on April 16 (this Thursday!) so go pre-order your copy if you’re interested. Though the book is available via the usual outlets, Will has also informed me that you can get 20% off if you order with code GLR BD8 via the Bloomsbury publishing page, linked again here.

You can go read more about Will’s work on his website, and you can subscribe to his newsletter here. As he put it, this newsletter “go[es] in depth on topics like kids’ books for deaf children and the dangers of perfection in parenting media.” I’ve just signed up, and I’m looking forward to following Will as he embarks on his own book tour this spring.

Will Fertman

As a closing note, right after I got back from my Stanford trip last week, I had the opportunity to meet another hearing mom of a DHH toddler after we both attended Tiffany Yu’s Anti-Ableist Manifesto bookstore event here in New Mexico. Right away, I was impressed: this parent has invested so much in learning ASL, as well as in making it possible for her daughter to grow up with Deaf people in her life as language models (and general role models). My own parents empowered me so much when they learned ASL, and I feel very happy whenever I see hearing parents signing with their kids, too, passing on language access to the next generation.

Without further ado, read on for Will’s insights on this subject!

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One thing I really appreciated about your book is its consistent emphasis on what’s most important for deaf and hard of hearing kids: a strong early language foundation, which is most accessible through learning sign language. What was your own journey into learning ASL with your family? Do you remember what prompted you to start to sign?

The story I generally tell is that our family didn’t know a lot, but we had clues. My grandmother was a CODA, my father had taken some ASL courses back in the 90’s. I had dated an oral deaf woman in grad school (hi, Kris!). My wife Minda also discovered a Deaf relative, who she contacted after our second son was identified in the hospital’s newborn hearing screen. So there was a trail of breadcrumbs we could follow.

But there were other factors. Both of us, for different reasons, came up as basically skeptical people. My wife is a punk-turned-biologist, and she worked at a nonprofit defending the teaching of contentious topics like climate change in the classroom. I grew up loving nerdy stuff like UFOs and cryptozoology, but understanding that it was all hoaxes and wishful thinking — I was maybe the youngest-ever subscriber to the Skeptical Enquirer.

The first couple months of Oscar’s life were really tough and traumatic, so it was hard to feel secure in our choices. At the time, we were both getting a lot of outside pressure from doctors and early intervention people to raise our son orally. But talking to oralists and LSL [Listening and Spoken Language] people felt like a visit from the traveling medicine show — there was a very evangelical, proselytizing vibe, and the harder they pitched us, the more suspicious we got.

We spent a lot of nights discussing it, and came to an agreement that the experts in this situation were going to be d/Deaf adults, folks who’d actually lived deaf childhoods. When we found them, their message was consistent: whatever you do with speech and hearing devices, also learn ASL. This fit with the actual scientific research we were finding.

It also appealed to our sense of basic fairness, the “What am I, an asshole?” theory of raising a deaf kid. I actually think a lot of parents start out with a hunch that sign language is going to be helpful, even if they don’t know the specific issues around language deprivation, but early intervention systems work hard to short-circuit that instinct.

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I’ve heard my own parents’ stories about what it was like to raise a deaf child during the 1990s. They had to wade through so many longstanding disagreements about language and deaf education, and they didn’t always feel like they had a clear guidebook to follow. In your life as a parent, did you have a specific moment when you decided you wanted to write this book to help other hearing families? How did you first get started?

It was probably a research trip Minda made early on to the Berkeley Public Library. The 70’s-era books she found were absolutely dismal: “Your deaf child will never read,” “Your deaf child will never go to college…” Even with our limited knowledge, we knew d/Deaf folks could read, and that there was a whole Deaf university! The irony was that at the same time, the pros on our early intervention team were soft-peddling the threat of language deprivation, and discouraging us from pursuing ASL. It felt like the bullshit was coming at us from every angle.

The experience definitely motivated me to write something, but between work, caregiving, night classes for ASL, and then COVID lockdown, it took a long time to actually start. Oscar was about 3½ when he started going to school in person, and I wrote most of the book between then and his sixth birthday. Which was good — if I could have somehow done it earlier, the book would have been much more raw, much more angry, and probably wouldn’t have served parents as well.

Because of our initial disappointment at the library, I focused on the advice of the Deaf professionals and friends we’d made, and on up-to-date scientific research that I could get online (it helped to have an actual scientist in bed with me at night to explain p values). Besides a couple classics like The Mask of Benevolence and Alone in the Mainstream, I wasn’t really focused on books, and I was pretty far along on my writing before I started turning up works that were more like the book I wanted to write: Madness in the Mainstream, Deaf Daughter, Hearing Father, and a couple others. But these titles were all either hard to find, or primarily meant for academics.

My goal was to make something that parents could dip into and enjoy, and not leave feeling overwhelmed or confused. But I also wanted to get on the shelf at the local library, so it could be there for the next family that needed it. This is where my goofy title came from, too: it had to be easy to google.

I think the timing has actually been great for my book. It’s coming out into a world where we’ve got more than one Deaf celebrity (that hearing folks can identify, at least). And there’s a flood of hearing parents out now on TikTok, signing with their deaf kids, and also d/Deaf creators online drawing huge audiences. And it’s coming on the heels of books like Articulate, Deaf Utopia, and True Biz, and even kid lit like El Deafo and You Don’t Know Everything, Jilly P. There’s not one single story (or genre) that needs to carry the entire truth about raising a deaf kid, but this environment is so much better for parents than it was when Oscar was born, and I think my book has a better chance of getting read, and entering into the cultural conversation.

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In this book, you also emphasize the importance of seeking out adult Deaf perspectives, including role models and subject-matter experts and generally cool people for your kid to hang out and sign with. Who has been most impactful in your family’s life? And who was most impactful to you in writing this book?

Without a doubt, the biggest influence on our family was the nanny we hired for Oscar and his hearing brother Leo, a Deaf woman we found through a friend of a friend of a friend. We didn’t have an ASL-based childcare option through our district, so once we decided to learn it as a family, we needed a Deaf caregiver who could expose both our children to fluent sign.

I’m not sure what she thought when she met us, but she understood the assignment right away. Her first day caring for the guys, she took them on a cross-Bay trek to the science museum in San Francisco, with a bunch of stops along the way: brunch with a Deaf friend, picking up a freecycled double stroller… Oscar was a few months old, and Leo was three, and we were getting photos of them from all over the city: on the bus, sitting in some unknown woman’s lap, in the lobby of a strange building, etc. It was a little scary for us parents to have our kids disappear in the company of a Deaf woman we’d just met, but she was relentlessly independent and self-assured, and we got the message. It rubbed off pretty quickly on the boys, too. Oscar in particular picked up a million skills from her besides ASL, but it’s the confidence that he learned from her that’s been key.

Two other women who made huge first impressions were associated with our local deaf services agency, DCARA [Deaf Counseling Advocacy and Referral Agency]. Kelly McCrary was our first Deaf mentor, and she was just a very fun, smart and kind person. I’ll never forget that on the day we met, she scooped Oscar into her arms and immediately started kvelling over him. I burst into tears, because she was the first adult since Oscar was identified who saw him as a baby, not a medical crisis. And really, she was the first person to give me a vision of what my son’s future could be.

Susan Gonzalez was the other one from DCARA — she was a lawyer and educational advocate who helped us when we got into conflict with our school district. She’s legendary in the Bay Area, and I have never met anyone who took less shit. It was remarkable to meet a Deaf woman like this, someone who absolutely radiated power and authority, and watching her stand up to our district’s IEP team was awe-inspiring. She’s been my role model for advocacy ever since.

In terms of the book, author Rachel Zemach was definitely the biggest influence. We were introduced by Oscar’s nanny while she was writing The Butterfly Cage. Since I used to work in magazines, I ended up helping her with some promotions as she finished up her book. While I was doing that, she absolutely went after me to write The Deaf Baby Instruction Manual. I put her off a couple of times, but she wouldn’t let it go. She believed in the project before I did, and was my first Deaf reader. I loved her perspective because she’d been an educator, working with mainstreamed deaf kids, many who had language deprivation of one degree or another — it was very different than what my family was going through, but at the same time, she gave critical insight into the ways school systems often work to undermine parents. We still meet regularly to talk shop, and to practice my ASL by interpreting kids’ books together.

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I often talk with my friends about how deafness is a spectrum: there are so many experiences out there, and deaf and hard of hearing people can navigate the world in such different ways. How did you decide to structure your book about raising deaf children, given this diversity? Which topics felt most challenging to research or to write about?

You’re right that there are many ways of being d/Deaf in the world. It’s why I decided to focus on a very small developmental period, because if deafness is a spectrum, early childhood is the very concentrated tip of a spreading beam of light. No parents, but especially parents of deaf kids, know exactly what their children will need, or who they will be, twenty-fifty years down the road. But we do know that a failure point for deaf kids, again and again, is lack of access to fluent language, and really lack of sign language. To abuse the light metaphor, when you withhold ASL from kids, you’re cutting out huge pieces of that spectrum, blocking whole colors that your child may need, or just want to choose from, in the future.

It’s one of the reasons I’m very open about Oscar’s languages and preferences in the book. He’s a CI [cochlear implant-wearing] kid, and he has strong receptive and expressive English skills on top of his good ASL. But access to ASL from an early age was clearly key in supporting his English development, and that’s what the science tells us, too: deaf kids have better spoken and written language outcomes when they also have strong sign language skills. And strong ASL means that he has access to the big-D Deaf community from the start, with Deaf peers and friends.

But children and their families are diverse in ways that go far beyond their hearing levels, prosthetics, or preferred languages (it’s why I spend so much of the book discussing family structure, heritage and religion). Many organizations that serve families will try to accommodate those differences by striking a pose of neutrality, but we’re in a situation where more than a century of oralism and eugenics has tipped the playing field far towards one end. All parents deserve to know the same set of facts, and those facts are not neutral; there are better and worse ways to go about raising a deaf kid, ways that are supported by decades of research.

So I was never conflicted about telling parents, “You probably should learn to sign,” or “Your early intervention team may not know what the fuck they’re doing.” The hard parts of the book were the sections where I either didn’t have a firm opinion — I call those the “carseat” chapters — or where I shared more of my personal experiences and felt more exposed. The final chapters on anger and love were really tough.

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What’s one of the best things that your deaf kid has brought into your life? What are some shared activities your family is most enjoying nowadays?

My deaf kid connected me with a whole Deaf community. I have friends and colleagues I never expected. It’s wonderful. Also, learning a second language late in life has probably staved off dementia for at least a couple years.

What do we do as a family now? Lately, Minda has been taking the kids kite flying. Berkeley has a gorgeous seaside park that’s perfect for it. I’ve been having fun with Oscar and his classmates hosting a comic book club at his school. We read, draw, and discuss comics—it’s fascinating to watch the kids as they work. We’re living in a golden age of children’s literature and kids’ comic books right now, and I’m happily along for the ride.

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Finally, any other writing projects on the horizon for you? What kinds of conversations do you hope your readers will have after reading your book?

There are sequels and updates planned for the Deaf Baby Instruction Manual; as a guidebook, it’ll eventually go stale, so I’ll be returning to it and probably expanding it by age. I gave deaf disabled kids only a few short words in the book, so their and their families’ perspectives are something I’d like to include more of in an updated volume. I’ve been getting a lot of requests for a Spanish language version for parents here in the US, too, so that’s also a possibility.

In terms of other writing projects, don’t tell my agent, but I’m working on a musical about the founding of MAD Magazine. For a change of pace. 🙂

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Many thanks again to Will for sharing these insights, and especially for writing a book like this. I know how many of the writers Will mentions here have impacted my own life with their books, too (hello, you know who you are!).

Here’s to all the shared insights about language access, supporting families and their DHH kids, and making this world a more signing-friendly place. Leave any of your own comments below.