Parenting With a Visual Impairment

Product Description

This book plus audio CDs shares helpful tips, techniques, attitudes, and preparatory experiences from successful parents who are blind and visually impaired.

The parents in Parenting with a Visual Impairment: Advice for Raising Babies and Young Children each completed an extensive written questionnaire and a 90-minute phone interview about how they accomplished parenting tasks using non-visual techniques.

Book Summarizes Parents’ Responses:

• Decided to have children
• Prepared to become parents
• Acquired information about pregnancy and childbirth
• Fed, diapered, and kept their newborns clean
•  Read to, played with, and visually stimulated their infants
•  Child proofed their homes and monitored their babies
• Managed fevers, medications, and medical care
• Taught colors, print letters and numbers, and drawing
• Monitored and kept their toddlers safe indoors and outdoors
• Traveled independently with their young children
• Dealt with reactions of medical care providers, family, and the public at large
• Handled attitudes of day-care staff, preschool teachers, and their child’s friends

Features:

• Provides family and Consumer Science students with visual impairments with information pertinent to their own lives as visually-impaired parents-to-be
• Helps transition students realize that their visual impairment should not stop them from including parenthood in their future plans
• Gives teachers an accurate picture of how blind adults take care of children so that teachers can impart this positive self-image to visually impaired students
• Gives adults who have lost vision tools to continue to care for their children
• Shows medical service, psychology, social work, counseling, protective service, and legal professionals how adults with visual impairments using alternate skill sets parent their children effectively
• Corrects the negative stereotypes about parents with visual impairments, which have, even in the 21st century, resulted in a newborn’s removal from her parents solely because both parents were blind