Last time, we looked at the influence of parental perception on the child's "view of themselves" and established that normal parent reactions are often enough to let the child know that they are different. In today's post, I'll be looking at the primary school years and how interactions between children make these differences obvious. Deaf but Still Different When I was in preschool, it was discovered that I was very deaf - the result of an uncontained ear infection. It would have been easy for me to wrongly attribute my differences to this problem (as I did with many of my social issues in secondary school). In primary school however, I was fortunate because our next door neighbour had a son the same age as me, who went to the same primary school and who was also deaf - albeit a much worse case. This gave me a benchmark for my social performance and it was obvious from day one of kindergarten, where he made instant and lasting friendships while I made...