Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and on this show, we discuss audiology and how it relates to you. We bring on guests who share their personal stories, as well as guests in different fields so we can dive in to the topics that are affecting you and your life. We also have lots of professionals and students listening to the show so, I love the fact that we have a dialogue in our community.

On today’s episode, we are going to be speeking about how to treat someone with a disability. I want to mention episode 43 that was on recently in July, with Genia Stephen. And on that episode, we talked about creating a vision for your child’s life. When someone has a disability, you are forced to make certain decisions. Whereas, in another situation where a child didn’t have a disability, you would just go with the flow and move from great to great and kind of move along in life without having to make big decisions. Whereas the journey with a child who is disabled is very different.

So, I’m excited to introduce our guest today, Chaya Klughaupt. She’s a parenting coach and also does marriage counseling. She’s going to share her story and her perspective.

Dr. Saperstein: “Welcome to the show.”

Chaya: “Hello.”

LS: “Thank you for coming on. Chaya, tell us a little bit about yourself.”

CK: “Okay, so first I’d like to start with that I’m a mother of seven. I have twenty-year-old triplets that were born when I was 24. I have a 17 year old, I have an 11 year old, and I have twins that just turned five. So, as a parent I have experience with teens and young adults and toddlers and multiples. So, I like to share a lot of my own personal experience with my parents, with classes, about my own err in childhood experiences. I learn a lot from them and I teach from them.”

LS: “Wait, so when you became a mother, you had one, two and three?”

CK: “Yeah, right away. I started off with three. I never knew what it was like to just have one child where both parents are taking care of that one child and all around that one child. Two parents do the diapers and the feedings and everything. Me and my husband were always juggling that between us. Someone has to feed them, or change the diapers. Thank God, it’s been a wonderful journey. At the beginning, I started off being very, very confident in myself and how I wanted to raise my triplets. I started with the triplets, so I had very confident ideas in how I wanted to raise them. And it actually went very well when they were babies. But it started to get a little more complicated for me as they got older and entered the school system. So, I’ll address that, I think, a little bit later.

I’d also like to add that I was born, well I was diagnosed as deaf when I was two and a half, almost three years old. I was diagnosed as deaf and the doctor who diagnosed me, told my parents that I would never learn how to speak and listen. That’s what the ytold my parents. This was in Toronto, Canada. They told my parents, ‘You have to send your daughter to the school for deaf and she’s gonna have to learn signing. And that’s it. You don’t have another choice.’

Thank God for my parents and their own sense,