Should I start learning Braille now in preparation for teaching my blind baby how to read someday?
My daughter, now five months old, has been recognised as "severely blind" (until she herself can tell us different) from some completely unknown disorder (literally, one in 7.4 billion!).
Anyway, I thought now might be a good idea to start learning Braille so that I can help teach her when she reaches that age. I'm just wondering if anyone here has had to learn Braille as an adult and whether you think it's worthwhile for a parent of a blind baby to learn in preparation for teaching their child to read someday?
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Welcome to the world of special needs parenting!
First, to address your immediate concern, my mom learned to read braille as an adult as part of her occupational therapy assistant job to teach it to a blind child. It wasn't terribly difficult to learn it well enough to teach the child at the same pace he was learning it. You don't have to memorize it, do it by feel, or at a rapid pace like she will, although you will probably end up naturally being able to read most of the characters by sight.
However, the thing about special needs parenting is the view is very different to an experienced insider than what you might see on a Hollywood movie or even from a friend or relative. My mom was teaching braille way before smart phones with cameras and text recognition were cheap and ubiquitous, but computers had already begun to displace much of the need for braille. You will discover other technologies that are surprisingly more useful than braille and other challenges that are surprisingly more challenging than reading. Try not to worry too much until you start to work on her actual individual needs.
This is not an authoritative answer, by any means, but I'd guess that, especially for kids' books, you would have the lines of Braille right under the lines of visual text, so you could read it aloud at the same pace as your child is following with their hands.
It would almost have to be done that way, actually, because if you learned Braille, yourself, how could you both read the same text (you aloud, child following along) at the same time? Only one set of fingers would be able to feel the dots at any time.
So, if you'd want to do that to be more tuned into what it's like for your child, great, but I don't think it would be necessary.
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