We talk to a lot of hearing families. Most are doing their absolute best. They want their Deaf child or grandchild or niece to feel included, and they’re willing to put in real work to make that happen.
And there are still some common patterns we see, year after year, that quietly undercut all that effort. Not because anyone is being careless — because no one ever told them. This list is meant to fill in some of those gaps.
1. Talking faster when the child looks confused
This is the most common one, and the most counterintuitive. A hearing parent notices their Deaf child isn’t following the conversation, gets concerned, and starts speaking more words faster to try to catch them up. It feels helpful. It’s the opposite.
A Deaf child reading lips or watching an interpreter is already working at full attention. More words faster means more they miss. The right move is the opposite: slow down, shorten the sentence, and make eye contact before you start.
2. Treating the interpreter as the conversation partner
When an ASL interpreter is in the room, hearing adults will often look at and address the interpreter instead of the Deaf person. The interpreter then translates, and the Deaf person watches the interpreter to receive the message. It’s functional but wrong.
The interpreter is a conduit, not the participant. Look at and speak to the Deaf person directly, the way you would anyone else. Say “What time should we leave?” to your child, not “Can you ask her what time she wants to leave?” to the interpreter. The interpreter will translate in the background; that’s their job.
3. Assuming a hearing aid or cochlear implant fixes the problem
Hearing technology has come a long way. It still doesn’t restore hearing the way glasses restore vision. A child with a cochlear implant may understand speech well in a quiet one-on-one conversation and almost nothing in a noisy restaurant. A hearing aid may help with some frequencies and not others.
The mistake is treating the technology as a permission slip to stop accommodating. A Deaf child with a CI still benefits from facing them when you speak, from captioning on the TV, from signing the punchline of a joke when they didn’t catch it. The technology is a tool. It isn’t a cure, and treating it like one tells your child their needs don’t matter once the device is on.
4. Speaking about a Deaf person who is right there
You’ve probably seen this at family gatherings. A relative leans toward the Deaf child’s parent and says, “Does she like school?” with the child standing two feet away. The parent answers. The child watches the exchange happen about them as if they weren’t in the room.
This is one of the most consistently damaging patterns we see. Talk to the child. If you don’t share a language, that’s a separate problem to solve — but the answer isn’t to route your conversation around them. It’s to face them, slow down, gesture, point, write things down if you have to. The effort is the message.
5. Letting siblings fill the role of interpreter
It’s natural for a hearing sibling to grow up serving as the family’s informal interpreter — relaying Grandma’s stories to their Deaf brother, translating the school nurse’s questions, summarizing what just happened on TV. Many CODAs and hearing siblings of Deaf kids end up doing this for decades.
There’s a real cost. The hearing sibling becomes a bridge for everyone else’s comfort, often at the expense of their own. The Deaf child stays dependent on the sibling to access basic family life. And the relationship can subtly tilt from siblings into something more like a caregiver dynamic.
Hearing siblings will help with informal translation — that’s natural in any multilingual family. But they should never be the primary access plan for anything that matters: medical appointments, school meetings, big family decisions, holiday gatherings. Adults need to do that work.
6. Turning captions on only when the Deaf person is in the room
Captions should just be on. All the time. The household default.
When a hearing family turns captions on only when their Deaf child walks into the room and off when they leave, the child learns that their access is conditional — that the rest of the family experiences a default world where they’re an exception. Leaving captions on permanently sends the opposite message: this is how our family watches TV, full stop. It also has a side benefit: hearing family members get used to reading subtitles, and many start to prefer them.
7. Apologizing for the language barrier instead of closing it
“I’m so sorry, I never learned to sign.” “I wish I could communicate with her better.” “I feel terrible.”
Hearing relatives say these things from a real place. But the Deaf person hearing them — or watching the interpreter relay them — isn’t receiving an apology. They’re receiving a barrier that the apologizer has not done anything about. After enough of those statements, it starts to sound like an excuse rather than regret.
The remedy isn’t more apologies. It’s learning ten signs. Then twenty. Then taking a community ASL class. The apology is in the action, not the words.
8. Expecting the Deaf person to do all the language work
Many hearing families assume that since the Deaf child can lipread, write, gesture, and use voice if they choose — communication will just sort itself out. The Deaf person carries the burden of bridging.
This is fundamentally unfair. Imagine if every family event required you, and only you, to operate in a language you weren’t fluent in, while everyone else relaxed in their native tongue. That’s the steady-state for a lot of Deaf people in hearing families. The minimum standard isn’t “the Deaf person can manage.” It’s “everyone shares the work of making communication happen.”
What we tell hearing families
You’re going to get things wrong. So will we. The goal isn’t to be perfect — it’s to be willing to be corrected and to keep going. When a Deaf family member points out a mistake, that’s a gift. It means they trust you enough to invest in your improvement. Receive it that way.
The hearing families that get this right aren’t the ones who studied hardest. They’re the ones who stayed humble, kept trying, accepted feedback, and showed up consistently year after year. The signing improved. The patterns shifted. The relationships changed.
It’s never too late to start doing this differently.
