James and his wife were married in 2006, and after several years began parenting classes to become foster and adoption parents. They now have 6 kids, 3 sons and 3 daughters, and for many years were required to take continuing education hours in parenting classes to keep their foster care license.

In those classes, a significant amount of the information was focused on the child’s early development, communication strategies, and the effect the communication can have on forming strong attachments with parents. Over his years of interpreting, James started seeing similarities between foster children and deaf children.

The similarities were distressing, because many of the deaf children were showing some of the same symptoms he had been trained to watch for in foster kids. Indicators of learning delays, lack of communication skills, missing interpersonal skills and various stages of neglect and attachment disorders. These characteristics were not caused by abuse or bad parenting, like they might be in situation where children are removed from their homes by the State, but by what he believed was long-term under-developed linguistic and interpersonal skills; great potential locked dormant in their hearts and minds, waiting for a way to express it.

There have been extensive studies on the early language development that children need and on how few deaf children have access to it. The data on the long-term effects of delaying or preventing the use of Sign Language for deaf children and it doesn’t work out well for them. This website is an attempt to close the gaps between deaf children and their hearing parents and maximize their ability to communicate as well as their future potential.