Language Development

Family Structure and Language Differences

Growing up with parents that divorced when I was at a young age, gave me two different gender roles and values to grow up with. Each parent was able to see me at two different times which gave me two different view points. From each parent there were values I liked and values I disliked. Each of there views gave me a greater understanding of who they are and where they came from and their perception of life.

Both my parents had very different upbringings. My father being a deaf son of hearing parents was forced to try and speak all the time, even when he was old enough to speak normally his parents constantly talked to him as though he was retarded or like a toddler, telling him to use his big words and ask for things not to point to them. Not till he was in school did he meet other deaf students and start to learn real communication and language skills. He was slow in some of his studies because of the way his parents treated him as a child, but excelled in written vocabulary. Ironically he was deficient in his writing proficiency. Because he had no oral basis of how to put together proper sentence structures he had a hard time writing papers or paragraphs. He only knew short sentences to describe what was happening to him or what he wanted. Because my father could not hear his family thought he wouldn't be able to do many things in life, including playing sports. They would constantly question him on how he was going to complete his goal to do anything in life. They treated his deafness as a disability, my father never saw it that way, he was simply different. The fact that he couldn't hear didn't make him less of a man just different! My father swore that he would never raise his kid hearing or not the way he was raised. He would encourage them in all that they did.

My fathers' values had the most meaningful impact on my life. The reason why is, I was able to relate to him more while growing up. I always played sports throughout school and that was the main influence my father had on me. His values of playing sports made us bond well together. However my father was deaf, and I a hearing child couldn't relate to some of the adversities he had to overcome as a non-hearing child playing these sports. My Father didn't like to get over emotional about anything, matter a fact the only emotion he usually showed was either happiness or anger. Like most deaf people when he gets mad he tends to vocalize more, of course he's not really aware of this, but I notice it. He also taught me his values of being masculine, such as to be strong and aggressive. A father's communication with children focuses more on encouraging initiative, achievement, and independence, often in relation to an activity that is the focus of interaction. He was big on not trusting anyone probably due to his upraising and people taking advantage of him because he couldn't hear. He taught me to rely on myself, but not to be afraid to ask for help now and then, which was contradictory of his own personality because he would never ask for help. He was a very proud man. Through sports and the influence of my father I was able to generate friends, this was essential to him, because these were the only friends he had outside the deaf community. I was able to have things in common with my fellow friends because we all played sports but I was not held back by a hearing barrier. Friends are an important part of my life and the first friends I ever had were through sports. If it wasn't for my fathers involvement and values of sports, I feel learning my masculine side would have been difficult.

My mother on the other hand grew up in a Mexican American household. She was not deaf, nor impeded in any way. Both her parents push her for education and expected nothing other than the best. She was a natural at school and had no learning disabilities. Her mother never went to school past sixth or seventh grade so it was important for her daughter to get a good education. Her father expected that all the house chores were to be done each day, and seeing how she was the only girl the house chores were for her and her mom, outside chores were for the boys. It was a very traditional upbringing to say the least. Due to the economic strain on the family and my grandfather's resilience against my grandmother working, her family grew up in poverty and my mothers' father wasn't around much. My mothers' values also had a positive influence on me. My mother had a hard childhood when she was growing up, so she wanted to raise me better then the way she was raised. Her values taught me to be kind and caring to other people these same values are what led her and my father to get married originally. Another value my mother taught me came at the time of dinner. As a family she wanted us to sit around the dinner table every night and express