Not to belittle the whole PC thing -- I get it: repeat to someone that they are at a disadvantage their whole life and they'll grow up believing it. My girl understands that her hearing makes her different but doesn't believe that it has hindered her life in any way. Having four kids pretty close in age, it's hard not to compare. My hard-of-hearing daughter is the one out of the four that will surprise us every few months with some new thing she decided to learn how to do from YouTube[0].

She's the most self-directed learner of all of my kids. I think she knows the right terminology. I know she doesn't care at all, though, and we've raised all of our kids to assume that people aren't out to offend you.

[0] She sings incredibly well -- something we didn't expect -- so a few years back she wanted to sing for the talent show but she wanted to do so with a puppet. We thought the puppet idea was a distraction and like the good parents we were, we let her demo it for us and didn't pay a whole lot of attention and tried to discourage her from using the puppet. She was super-discouraged and, thankfully, we asked her to do it again. It was at that point that we realized she was singing beautifully and ... not moving her lips at all. I think she was 8.