Like all parents, I wanted to make the playground as safe for my kids as possible. But, how can a blind parent ‘watch’ his kids while they are running around being themselves? I will cover some of the techniques I used to ensure the playground was as fun and safe as it could be.

 

Can a blind parent with children participate in the care of those children?

        When my children were younger, they really enjoyed spending time at the playground; so did I. They got to play on the swings, ride on the merry-go-round, and play with their friends.

 

 

I also made a lot of friends—parents watching their own children. It is amazing how quickly total strangers can strike up a conversation when they are sharing an experience. And, in this case, we were watching our children have a great time.

 

Sighted parents want to know how I watch my kids.

After I shot-the-breeze with a fellow parent while we would sit on the playground benches, eventually, they would ask about my white cane. And, if my bench companions were bold enough, they would ask me, “How can you watch your kids if you can’t see them”?

 

I’ll admit it. I liked it when I got this question. Few things please me more than educating people on techniques that are simple and enable a vision impaired person to do pretty much anything a sighted person could do. That includes how I watch my kids.

 

Two simple techniques for watching your kids if you are blind

I would like to take credit for coming up with these non-visual techniques for keeping track of my kids in an open area. But, like most really good ideas, someone else told them to me. My thanks to Susan Povinelli for passing along the ideas she perfected while being a blind parent of her own two children.

 

The only real challenge to watching your kids without sight is knowing if they are there and where they are. Here are two of Susan’s tips she passed along to me.

If your children are younger, lace small bells in their shoes. As they move around, you can track them by the ringing noise they make.

When they are older (too old for bells) decide on a signal that you will shout to let them know to shout back. In the case of my children, I would shout out their full names at intervals. When they heard my signal, they would shout back, “Here”! On the other hand, if I just called out their first names that was their signal to come over to me.

 

Rarely does being vision impaired have any impact on the kind of parent you can be.

Most solutions for overcoming the challenges of vision loss are quite simple. It is just a matter of knowing what the adaptive techniques are and then implementing them consistently.

 

As far as being a blind parent watching your kids, the solutions are quite simple. The biggest challenge is knowing where your kids are. In order to solve this problem, you can put bells on their shoes. Or, you can come up with a signal that when your kids hear it, they let you know everything is okay.

 

Got some more simple ideas that enable the vision impaired to participate more fully? Leave me a comment. My kids might be all grown up now. But, I still continue to learn.