Switched At Birth Analysis

Switched at Birth is a tv series following two families that had their teenage daughters switched at birth. One of the daughters, Bay Kennish, is raised in upper class society, given anything and everything she asks for. The other daughter, Daphne Vasquez, is from a working-class Latino family, raised by her single mother. Much to the surprise of the Kennish family, Daphne is deaf. The tension of the early episode stem from the fact that she became deaf after contracting meningitis at the age of three. The Kennish family invites the Vasquez family to move into their guest house in order for the families to get to know each other’s biological daughters. Some of the things I learned about Deaf Culture was confirmed by class. It was interesting to see the Kennish family initially reacted to Daphne, considering that they had never interacted with a deaf person before. They automatically started raising the volume of their voices in order for Daphne to “hear” when in truth, she was only able to hear very little with the help of hearing aids, which only enabled her to hear
One of the characters, Emmett, refuses to take speech therapy. Emmett was exclusively a part of the deaf community and rarely interacted with hearing people. Both of his parents were deaf or hard of hearing and he went to a deaf school all of his life. Emmett had a lot of frustration towards hearing people because they were unable to understand him and vice versa. The Kennish family starts to make an effort to learn how to sign which I did not realize how hard as well as difficult it is to learn. In normal conversation, like in the tv show, there are so many words I do not consciously think about having to know. And if there is not a word for it, then they finger spell it very quickly. However, it was interesting to see how much I was able to pick up in the first couple episodes with only a month’s worth of