The rights of deaf children

Practitioners facilitating the development of children and young people who are deaf or hard of hearing understand the complexity of the process, which is often fraught with challenges and bias. The complexity stems partly from the expertise required to be effective in such endeavours. For example, practitioners must understand the fundamentals of child development, followed by high-level expertise in signed and spoken language development, literacy, cognition, and social skills, among other domains. The bias often stems from a practitioner whose training has been oriented only toward one way to support deaf children and one way to interact with caregivers. We, the senior editors of Deafness & Education International, are committed to publishing a broad range of articles to support practitioners to maximise the positive influence of their work.