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