Paul Preston, PhD
(Harvard Press, 1994) [278 pages]

'Mother father deaf' is the phrase commonly used within the Deaf community to refer to hearing children of deaf parents. Based on a national study of adult hearing children of deaf parents and written by TLG staff member Paul Preston, the book explores the intimate intersection of families like his own - families which embody the conflicts and resolutions of two often opposing world views, the Deaf and the Hearing. "Although I have normal hearing, both of my parents are profoundly deaf. This book explores the lives of other people like myself -- hearing children of deaf parents. I begin with my father's story because it is part of my family history. It is one of the pieces that I know about a hearing grandfather long dead, and about my father as a young boy. Three generations -- my grandparents, my parents, and myself -- represent a twist in our family moebus strip: Hearing into Deaf into Hearing. Like most of the families described within this book, both grandparents and grandchildren are hearing -- yet, somehow different from each other...My goal in this book is not only to examine the lives of a particular group of men and women who shared a common childhood feature, but to understand how they made sense of that experience."