Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

My boys and I went to the park today.  We climbed a tree, threw a boomerang, and did the swings.  My six year old, out of the blue, asked, “How does the echolocation kid find his way home?”  Wow, I guess kids do that.  One second you think they’re just swinging and staring at the clouds.  Then they hit you with one of these million dollar questions.  Neil saw the video 2 months ago and hasn’t said a word about it since.  Apart from being impressed by the question, I thought about how to explain being blind to the boys.  Neither of them have any disabilities, not even glasses, and I don’t think they’ve ever known anybody with a disability.  On the swings, at dusk in the park, my two boys and I had a talk about the blind kid.  I tried to teach them about the five senses.  We pretended we were blind and we walked around the park touching things and describing them.  Nobody else was there or I might have felt a little silly.  But, here’s what we did.

Touch

The swings are suspended from a metal rod attached to 8 diagonal steel supports.  That’s where we started.  Closing our eyes, we tried to determine how we could tell it was a swing set without looking at it.  At first, when we tried it, the boys described it as metal, obviously because they already knew what it was.  I had to direct them to consider texture; was it bumpy or smooth?  Did it feel cold or warm?  What shape is it?  And, what does shape and incline angle of it tell us?  Sight is so integral to how we perceive the world that it was natural to try to describe the object by starting with its definition rather than the proof behind the definition.  A swing set has to do more than just look like a swing set to be a swing set.

Smell and Taste

For learning to  use our noses we went to a tree that I already knew was oozing with tree sap, thus making it, obviously, a tree.  Alan, my 5 year old, while climbing the tree earlier, had stuck his hand in it.  Again, we closed our eyes.  We smelled the tree and tried to commit the scent to memory.  I like to watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America.  He’s a famous chef who goes into failing restaurants and conducts crash course fix ups to make them profitable again.  A recurring stunt that Gordon Ramsay pulls is having the chef, who typically makes awful food, do a blind smell and taste test.  He proves, each time the chef can’t tell the difference between pork and scallops, that even chefs, who should rely on their noses, can become fixated on the visual and neglect the thing that makes food most appealing – taste and smell.  Our park adventure reminded me of that.  My boy had earlier stuck his hand in very sticky, and smelly, tree sap.  But, he didn’t recognize the smell until we concentrated on it and stored it to memory.  Wine and tea  tasters commit dozens of unique tastes to memory for a living.  It is not impossible to have super taste and smell, it just needs to be developed.  It’s also how dogs find explosives and drugs in concealed places.  I tried to explain to my boys that blind people use taste and smell to a greater degree than people with sight.  100% of the enjoyment they get from food will be from smell and taste.  Presentation means nothing to a blind person; there is no fooling them on taste.

Hearing

Close your eyes and listen to all the sounds around you.  It’s amazing how many there are and how difficult it is to organize them in our heads without visual reference.  We might know the sound of cars on a busy road, but could we distinguish their spacing, speed and number.  Remember that we’re also being distracted by hundreds of other sounds, some major like ambulance sirens, some minor like the clicking of street lights as they change.  My boys and I sat on a park bench and listened to cars going by.  The exercise was to try to tell what kind of car was passing judging from the sound the engine made.  The boys guessed and then peeked to verify.  Surprisingly they did pretty well.  They knew small cars versus trucks for instance.  They could tell old cars from new ones too.  I told them that blind people can also tell the make and model of cars by sound.  That’s how blind people get around on the streets.  I also explained that a blind person who lived in the city might feel out of his depth in a rural community where all the sounds change.  I blind rural person who moves to the city has to learn a whole different set of rules in order to get around.  The echo location boy found his way around by having super hearing.  He knew where he was based on the slightest changes in sound around him.

I don’t think the boys really understood the depth of what it means to be completely blind – all the time.  Our experience was simply a teaching experience, and we could open our eyes at any time.  But, for blind people, it is more than an experiment.  They have to entirely re-tune the way they think about the world just to be able to get around.  All boys understand superheroes.  My kids are no different.  Ben (the echolocation kid) developed super-powers as compensation for lost vision.  The boys could understand that much.  I hadn’t thought about trying to teach my boys about the 5 senses before Neil tossed me that question about the blind kid.  Then I thought, what a good opportunity to play a learning game.  We had fun, and I think the boys learned that to truly perceive the world they should be using all their senses, not just their sight.  Our eyes are a blessing to us.  They can also be a crutch.  What would we do if we relied too heavily on them just to have them taken away one day?  Our lives are richer when we develop all the senses.

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