For sighted people, so much of childcare involves using our vision that it can be hard to imagine how we would carry out those tasks without it. However, we could say the same of many other life skills that both sighted and vision-impaired people do every day.
Add twins to the mix, and it gets even more astounding. After all, we’ve all heard stories (whether from real people or sitcoms) of parents who can only tell their twins apart by writing an initial on each twin’s foot with a marker, or even by rushing back to the hospital to compare footprints!
One blind dad is taking his experiences public, helping the sighted world understand how he carries out parenting tasks, including telling his babies apart.
Souleyman Bah Shares His Story
Souleyman Bah, who goes by the handle BlindDadUK on TikTok, has begun sharing his experience as a paraathlete, businessman, and father with the world.
He has three kids under the age of three: a toddler daughter, and infant twins. He also has retinitis pigmentosa, which is a degenerative disorder that gradually decreases vision into an ever-narrower tunnel. He tells Berkshire Vision that the condition does make some parenting tasks more difficult.
“Parenting is of course difficult as it is, and then adding onto that my visual impairment has been quite challenging. Simple things like not being able to see measurements on the baby bottle, not knowing whether you’ve cleaned the baby properly, or not seeing visual cues that suggest the baby might be ill- it makes things a lot harder.”
That said, he hasn’t allowed it to stop him, and he shares on TikTok some of the methods he uses to parent his children, including how he tells his infants apart.
So, How Does He Tell The Babies Apart?
Bah uses several methods, including remembering where each baby is (which every exhausted and overwhelmed parent knows is a tough one, and will only get tougher as they become more mobile).
He does rely somewhat on his remaining vision, saying he can see the difference in the babies’ hair color and their outfits.
One main cue he describes using is the difference in the babies’ weights, but even from the beginning, he says, their cries were distinctive, and he could tell them apart by sound.
For other parenting tasks, he’s worked out methods, sometimes relying on resources and tools.
For instance, to handle bottle-making, which requires accurate measurements, he says he’s found a device that prepares and dispenses the formula.
In the clip below, you can see this dad juggling all three small children during a feeding.
The Failure Of Color-Coding
One common trick that parents of twins use is color-coding, especially when they have one boy and one girl. It’s super convenient because when you’re shopping for babies, almost any item you can name comes in pink or blue.
That trick falls short with low vision, though. Bah says he’s had to work out his own ways to tell items apart, including asking someone else what color each item is.
However, he’s also juggling the difficulties that come with being a parent of multiples, like how to feed both at once. In the previous video, we saw him balancing both on his lap, feeding one baby while the other had a pacifier. Now he says he’s using a special pillow that helps keep both babies in the bottle position at once.
Blindness And Parenting
As mentioned previously, it’s easy for sighted people to leap from “I can’t imagine how I’d do this task without vision” to “people without vision can’t do this task.”
For that reason, the National Federation for the Blind has taken steps to release guidance for social workers, lawyers, and others to prevent parents from being treated unfairly. There are many of these stories: a blind couple who were ordered to have 24-7 assistance in their home to care for a newborn; a couple who had their newborn removed from their care (and returned after a few months and some assistance from the NFB and other organizations) because they wouldn’t have a full-time sighted helper in the home.
One such incident would be too many, and that’s not touching the incidents that don’t make it to the legal system, such as strangers with prying questions and inappropriate insinuations.
The fact is, parenting isn’t only for the able-bodied, the sighted, and the hearing. Babies are raised by people who are deaf, or blind, or who use wheelchairs, or who have limb differences, or with other disabilities, every day.
Like Bah, and like every parent regardless of abilities, they find ways to handle each challenge.
If you’d like to read more about this topic, I can highly recommend a book by Jo Elizabeth Pinto, titled Daddy Won’t Let Mom Drive the Car: True Tales of Parenting in the Dark.