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This book reports on the first substantial UK study of parenting, disability and mental health. It examines the views of parents and children in 75 families. Covering a broad spectrum of issues facing disabled parents and their families, Parenting and disability:
provides a comprehensive review of relevant policy issues;
explores the barriers to full participation in parenting that disabled parents face;
examines the complex ways in which broader social divisions, including gender and socioeconomic status, interact with disability;
advocates measures to support disabled parents and their families by promoting and supporting relationships within the family.
The book is aimed at a wide audience, including students and academics in social policy, social work, disability studies, sociology, education, and nursing, people working in the voluntary sector, disabled activists and their supporters, as well as policy makers and practitioners in a range of statutory agencies.
This chapter addresses the importance of looking at parenting and disability as involving sets of relationships between family members, as well as promoting parental choice and control. It emphasises the social experience of disability, which affects individuals and relationships within the family and between family members and the outside world. The chapter discusses the complicated ways the experiences of impairment and disability intersect, with reference to the nature of mental-health impairments and their origin, which is in most cases in social experience. It also reviews the understanding of the social model of disability, in order to correctly present the experiences of people with mental distress.
This book reports on the first substantial UK study of parenting, disability, and mental health. It examines the views of parents and children in seventy-five families. Covering a broad spectrum of issues facing disabled parents and their families, the book: provides a comprehensive review of relevant policy issues; explores the barriers to full participation in parenting that disabled parents face; examines the complex ways in which broader social divisions, including gender and socioeconomic status, interact with disability; and advocates measures to support disabled parents and their families by promoting and supporting relationships within the family.
This chapter concludes with some potentially fruitful areas of future research on parenting and disability. It looks at the different challenges for disability theory, policy, and practice, and reveals a new direction for the field that provides more equal opportunities. The chapter reviews the meaning attached to domestic and ‘caring’ work in the context of children and parents, before finally highlighting some possible avenues for future research.
This chapter provides a short overview of the demographic characteristics of the sample of parents and families who participated in the study. It discusses in detail the methodological issues that were believed to be unnecessary in the body of the text. Most of these issues are also studied in Appendix One.
This chapter addresses the issue of support, focusing primarily on the barriers that a lot of disabled parents can face when accessing support in raising children. It presents the argument that the support needs of disabled parents aren't different to those of all parents. The chapter further stresses the importance of removing all barriers to participation in parenting instead of establishing an inappropriate welfare response that is supposedly aimed to meet their ‘special needs’. It then examines the access to both formal and informal sources of support, and the interaction between them. The chapter also looks at the access to support for disabled parents within the context of broader divisions within society, especially those based on social disadvantage and gender.
This chapter provides a review of relevant literature on parenting and disability, which looks at parenting support and the barriers that certain parents encounter when bringing up their children. It argues that disabled parents have been mainly invisible in that particular tradition of social-policy research. The chapter studies policy context, particularly of the 1989 Children Act and the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. It aims to determine the role these Acts play in structuring the response of formal services to disabled parents. The chapter also tries to show how their practice and policy legacies influence the way parents are supported.
This chapter studies the extent of children's involvement in domestic and ‘caring’ work, as well as the context it takes place in. It explores the different factors that might influence the degree to which children are involved in domestic and caring responsibilities, and the nature of any involvement. The first few sections of the chapter examine what the quantitative data can reveal about the identification of children as ‘young carers’, including their involvement and relationship to certain variables. The second half of the chapter is focused on discussing the factors that influence the involvement of children in caring and other work.
This chapter views the experiences of disabled parents of raising their children from a life-course perspective. It considers the changing problems and choices that are faced by disabled parents, including decisions about having children, changes to family composition and parental impairment, and their plans for the future. It is noted that change is important to understand parenting and disability.
