The paper describes some of the major demographic differences between hearing impaired students with normal-hearing parents and those with hearing-impaired parents, based on Office of Demographic Studies data, and attempts to illustrate the complex interaction involved between these variables, academic achievement, and early parent-child communication methods (i.e., manual or verbal). The authors, while not denying the data showing the superiority of deaf students with deaf parents on various measures of academic and social adjustments, nevertheless contend that when comparing students according to parental hearing status, to infer that such differences are due to communication history alone overlooks many educationally and personally significant variables that should be considered. (Author/DLS)