andreashettle:

actuallyblind:

Awwww hey!

So you were right, the answer is yes. You can absolutely have kids as a blind person. There are so many blind people who have kids and raise them just as normally as anybody else every day, and I even know a few of them myself. In fact, the president of the National Federation of the Blind and his wife are both blind, have been since they were young, and have three young and thriving kids, two of which are blind, themselves.

Of course, becoming a blind parent first requires you to be independent enough to take care of yourself first, which usually requires some training, but once you’ve got yourself down, honestly the possibilities are endless. People freak out at the very thought of a blind person in control of a child, but it’s because they have no idea how a blind person could do anything, and it’s because of that very ignorance that drives that fear. They can’t imagine a way to do something without seeing, so they assume that there must not be a way. But there are so, so many ways…

Did you know that a lot of blind parents put bells on the shoelaces of their children’s shoes to keep track of them when out and about or at the playground?

Did you know that a lot of blind parents help the children with their homework by simply having the child read the problem aloud to them?

Did you know that there is technology that allows a blind parent to scan a child’s homework and have immediate access to the text on the sheet on a computer or a cell phone so that they can hear it for themselves or read it with a braille display?

Have you ever noticed that little kids make a whole lot of noise when they go anywhere? When you’re in your own home, it’s pretty difficult not to know where young kids are. From the sound of their bare feet slapping around tile and hardwood and shuffling across the carpet, to the sounds of their breeding that is not quite as silent as they might think it is if they try to hide, to the sound that every toy they play with will make every time they touch it, to all of the sounds and words that will come out of their mouth on an incredibly regular basis, little kids make a whole lot of noise even when they aren’t upset or laughing, and it’s pretty easy to tell where they are. And if you need to leave the room, you make the same judgment call that any sighted parent does and decide if it’s quick enough to leave them unattended for a moment, or you take the child with you to keep track of them and make sure they aren’t getting into things. Little kids are a lot easier to keep track of and people think when they first imagine taking care of a child without eyesight, and it’s almost difficult to NOT know exactly where they are in the room. Even the common so called trump card of a child touching a hot stove is easy to prevent. If you were standing at the stove, you will absolutely noticed the sound of a child coming into the room, and if you don’t, you will definitely notice the feeling of a tiny body standing next to you with that less than discrete breathing. It’s incredibly easy to prevent as long as you’re paying attention as any decent parent is. And even if all else fails, if all of that still somehow doesn’t work, a bird finger is never the end of the world and most kids will do it at some point or another whether their parents are blind or sighted. A little cool water, children’s Motrin, and some kisses and comfort will make them forget it ever happened to weeks later.

Even babies can be easily taken care of by a blind person. A baby too young to crawl certainly can’t get away from you anywhere, so you will almost definitely always know where a baby is because he will probably be holding it or have it sitting in a swing or a cradle or a bouncer. And feeding a baby? Absolutely a no-brainer. It’s pretty easy to find a babies bottom lip and make sure the bottle and is up in the right spot, same thing when they move onto real food. Now, it might mean you have might have to touch a few more dirty faces and get a little more drivel on your fingers, but it’s a small price to pay.

Even taking them places. If you’re a blind person independent enough to have children, clearly you’ve probably already made the move to live somewhere with public transit so that you can support yourself by getting to the grocery store, your job, even the local bar. Plenty of sighted families raise children all the time without cars, and how? Utilizing public transit, of course. Plenty of sighted parents do it all the time and it’s no different for blind parents. The only difference is that some blind parents might be pulling a stroller behind them instead of in front so that they can still easily navigate with their cane in front of them.

And then people ask a whole bunch of questions like “well what if you mix up a child’s medication?” And “how would you even know which jar is the baby food?”

These questions go back to some general blindness skills that have nothing to do with being exclusive to being a parent. Blind people label things all the time and it’s easy to tell a whole bunch of different things apart. Think about it: a can of SpaghettiOs feels a heck of a lot different from a much shorter, wider can of corn that doesn’t have a mechanism on top to open it, right? Blind people also label those things. We have this clear tape with a sticky adhesive on the back that we used to label things in braille. We use braille writers and braille slate and styli to write braille on the line of tape specially designed to fit in the writers and slates, and then we cut the tape at the end of the label and Peele off the backing and stick a label on things. You may be asking, “how did you know what to label the thing in the first place?” Well, there’s an app for that. There are apps for almost everything, and the blindness community is no different. One app in particular is called TapTapSee, and it allows you to take a picture and have that picture sent to a team of sighted people at any hour and receive back a description of what the photo is of, such as a can of corn or a box of Lucky charms. Of course, the subject matter is not restricted to food, but a lot of people use it when they get home from the grocery store to organize the things they can’t recognize by tactile and auditory indicators alone such as a bunch of cans of different things that are all the exact same shape and size and make roughly the same sound when you wiggle them.

Now talking about medicine, since mixing up medication could actually be dangerous. Medicine bottles tend to look fairly similar, but there are always a whole bunch of different kinds. There’s some with those childproof lids, the Motrin bottle that has that very distinct weird lid, that Tylenol bottle that also has a pretty distinct lid, and even the pretty standard prescription medication bottles can come in different heights. But let’s say for the sake of the situation that you have a bunch of those pretty standard prescription medication bottles. How do you know which one is the medicine for your kid? Well, first of all you can label it as soon as you bring it home before it goes into the cabinet with the rest, the rest of which are also probably already labeled. But you can also check out the pill itself. Pills are pretty similar, but are still almost always just a little bit different from every other one you have. Whether it’s much larger, much smaller, has a different texture, is oblong instead of round or vice versa, is circular but thicker or thinner then another circular pill you have, or is oblong but has a seam in the middle that another oblong pill does not or vice versa, or has a smooth glossy texture or something a little more rough, almost every pill is just a little bit different in shape and size and texture. Chances are you will not have two totally different pills that look and feel exactly the same. Sometimes some pills even have little logos or words engraved into them, and while you can’t read it, you can feel that there is an engraving there and that another pill does not have it. So even if labeling doesn’t work, the minute you pull the pill into your hand and pluck it between your fingers, you will notice if something is wrong.

So this is obviously only a vague overview, and I’m not a parent myself so I can’t answer a whole lot more than this, but it really is easily possible and really isn’t any harder than it is for anybody else. There is, in fact, an entire division of the National Federation of the Blind made up of blind parents, specifically for the purpose of advocating for the rights of line parents and educating newer blind parents who need answers, to support those who want to become parents or plan to but still don’t know if they can, and all of those other things. I’m actually going to give you that resource, because it can probably help to comfort you a lot for the future as well as serve as very informational and enlightening on all aspects of blindness, not just to you but to everybody else reading.

Resources for blind parents:
https://nfb.org/blindparents

That page has a ton of information. The organization has many articles and documents and pieces of writing by whole bunch of line parents to give you as much information as they can, it has links to videos from blind parents on how they parent, and even a link to the blind parents email listserv that you can absolutely join to get answers to questions or just to read emails that come through and learn from a distance.

I really hope this helped and that the link above can give you even more comfort that everything you could ever want for the future is more than possible and within reach. Blind parents live every day in this world and I know some of them personally, and it is not because they are extraordinary blind people who beat the odds, but because they are in fact incredibly ordinary blind people who know that they are just as capable of parenting as anybody else.

Thank you for asking and never be afraid to ask more!

Additional resources,

For parents with a range of different disabilities, though focused on the UK: http://disabledparentsnetwork.org.uk/

Again in the UK, for parents who are blind or have low vision: http://www.rnib.org.uk/information-everyday-living-family-friends-and-carers/resources-blind-or-partially-sighted-parents

A few more links for parents with disabilities in general, in the US: http://www.apa.org/monitor/may03/resources.aspx