Guide Dog Discussions

My daughter is having trouble coping with this most recent loss of vision.   To sum up, she is almost completely blind right now.   Hopefully some of the vision will be returned to her left eye, but for now she’s operating without sight.    This is hard for her because she doesn’t have all the skills she needs to move around without sight.

She’s been working with her teacher on learning cane skills, but she isn’t ready to have one on her own unassisted yet.    That was fine with her partial vision, but we’re getting her a cane to help right now and are hoping to get some additional instruction over the summer on appropriate cane use.   The trick with a cane at this age is bad habits are quick to be made and hard to break and as sighted adults, we have no idea what’s appropriate or inappropriate use.

We’ve had many people suggest a guide dog which sounds like an enticing option.   What we found out is a guide dog works on commands only.   The dog needs to be directed by the blind person, who knows where they want to go and how to get there.   The user must be in control at all times and give the dog appropriate commands and directions.   This means the user must be not only competent in Orientation and Mobility skills, they must have experience navigating around their world.

What a guide dog does is responsible for guiding the user around obstacles and indicating the location of steps and curbs.   Guide dogs are colorblind and can’t tell when a it’s safe to cross a street, the user indicates to the dog when it’s safe to cross based on crosswalk audio signals.

Should we as parents look into getting a guide dog for our daughter.   The answer we’re getting from the experts is absolutely not.  Most schools won’t accept an applicant under the age of sixteen to be trained and paired with one of their dogs.  Another decision is the child’s travel experience.   At sixteen, many blind children haven’t had enough travel experience to make an informed decision weather or not to use a guide dog.

Canes are very useful, give the user information about their surroundings, collapse and can be stored easily, are inexpensive and don’t require daily maintenance such as feeding.   The advice we’ve been given is placing a guide dog in the hands of a child is a disservice to both the animal and the child.

So for now we’re working on strengthening my daughter’s cane work and overall orientation and mobility.   Maybe when she’s older she’ll want a guide dog, we’ve got some time to find out.   Hopefully more than anything though she’ll have some of her vision returned so she won’t have a need.

The Big Boy Update:  We were in stopped traffic going to Maryland today.   In the middle of inching along my son said this about one of his classmates, “Benton had traffic like this one time, but worse.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is having a hard time of things lately, something I don’t blame her for at all, but we’re still going to have to place boundaries on her for appropriate behavior. She was mad at me yesterday and called me ‘stupid’.   I told her there would be consequences if she used that word to describe anyone again.    She thought about it and then told me, “and mom, you don’t look good.”