[blparent] Keeping young children safe as parents with a visual impairment

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

Give the state any information you can find, but Sheila is right.  Like I 
told my sister when she worried that my baby would put something in her 
mouth and choke on it, or get knocked over by the dog, or some other 
horrific thing--blind parents don't keep the emergency rooms open by 
themselves.  Accidents happen to everybody, and the best you can possibly do 
is take every precaution you can think of, and then maybe try to dream up a 
few more, and then relax, know basic first aid, and hope for the best like 
all other parents do.  I know sighted parents whose children drank cough 
medicine and had to go get charcoal in the emergency room, or swallowed 
coins and had to go to the hospital and get them fished out.  I've got a 
friend who had a neighbor that lost her two-year-old to strangulation 
because of a cord on a window blind.  I've got another friend who knows a 
couple with a ten-year-old daughter who nearly drowned in a swimming pool 
last summer.  None of them were bad parents.  Momentarily inattentive maybe, 
but who hasn't been?

I guess that would be my main stress point for the social workers, is that 
you realize as blind parents, you have to be more attentive than your 
sighted peers.  You have to know what possible dangers are in the 
environment, eliminate the ones you can, and take extra care to put what 
shouldn't be reached out of reach.  You have to follow safety rules 
rigidly--hold hands in parking lots, cut grapes and hot dogs in half to 
minimize the choking risk, etc--because you know you can't fall back on your 
vision.

Jo Elizabeth

"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, 
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of 
the weak and the strong.  Because someday in life you will have been all of 
these."--George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, American scientist

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Sheila Leigland" <sleigland at bresnan.net>
Sent: Friday, December 30, 2011 8:51 PM
To: "NFBnet Blind Parents Mailing List" <blparent at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [blparent] Keeping young children safe as parents with a visualimpairment> I don't know if we did anything differently than sighted parents should 
have been doing accept understand that vision was not an option to be used. 
We had baby gates. We had a baby monitor, when we built a deck it was railed 
and had a gate on it. We taught him to come when he was called and that lule 
was consedered unbreakable. We had a fenced yard in fact it was six feet 
high and then people complained that it looked like a prison. We had a baby 
gate separating the kitchen and the living room until our son discovered at 
the ripe old age of 2 how to unlock it. Then we were told that he watched us 
do it surprise surprise he could see. We tried to keep him from climbing oh 
welll that only lasted so long. We held hands when we crossed the street. 
There is no way to plan for everything and sighted people can't do it eiter. 
And if they claim that they do they are deceiving themselves as well as 
others.
>
> Sheila Leiglan d
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