The deaf child and his family / by Susan Gregory.

  • Gregory, Susan, 1945 May 28-
Date:
1976
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The deaf child and his family / by Susan Gregory. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE DEAF CHILD AT PLAY 41 brake on, he's got to do everything. He will not take it until everything's done. Girl, 4 years, severely deaf No, she pretends a post office. She's always liked the post office. She pretends to stamp . . . Oh, and bus conductors, this is the dog's lead she has over her head for the tickets, she winds it round and gives you your change, she's very good at that. She's got that off. Boy, 4 years, moderately deaf He pretends a motorway. He has pile-ups - everything. It's the Ml аЦ over the front room when he starts. Ambulances, police cars. Everything. It's imagination - he's never really seen it. Boy, 6 years, severely deaf Well, he pretends to smoke and he pretends to go to the shops, and he pretends he's going out for a drink. See if we have a drink in the evening we show him, you know Mummy and Daddy are having a drink and things like that, and so when he has a drink he gets dressed up in fancy clothes and things like that and sits and pretends to have a drink. The biggest one I think is going to the shops. I can't go to the shops - he brings me things and asks me what I want and I tell him what I want from the shops and he goes to fetch them. Sometimes I have to join in but it's [his sister] who is co-operative, that lets me out. He'll be the shop-keeper as well. He sets himself a shop up, he's got a little tiU and things like that, he does quite well really. There is clearly a qualitative difference of the degree of fantasy involved in the various pretend games. Pretending a motorway crash, with ambulances and poUce cars, is much more sophisticated than putting two sticks together to make an aeroplane. Pushing a pram around is a less complicated game than setting up a shop with a till and being a shop-keeper. It is possible to make a dis¬ tinction between simple fantasy games which are simple isolated pretences, pretending to pour a cup of tea, pretending to drive a car; and extended fantasy games where the situation is developed, e.g. pretending a tea party or pretending a motorway pile-up. In the first four examples given, only simple fantasy was involved, whereas the second five involved much more complex situations. It is, of course, necessary to establish who initiated the complexity, for in some cases, although deaf children were involved in complex games, other children made the running. For this classification, i.e. for a situation to be categorised as extended fantasy, the deaf child must