Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the research literature concerning the parenting of disabled people, as well as other issues – or ‘problems’ – that relate more indirectly to the parenting of disabled people. In addition, this chapter places our research within some of the key legislative and policy frameworks that underpin the relationship between the state, disabled parents, and their children.

This highlights three particularly important issues. First, disabled parents are all too often absent from research agendas that emphasise the social and environmental context in which parenting takes place. We look at their exclusion from the growing body of research that has, in recent years, focused on the provision of parenting support and education services. However, this reflects a much broader invisibility: a search of the literature for the terms ‘disabled’ and ‘parents’ yields many studies of childhood disability but fewer about parental disability. Where parental disability is referred to, it is more commonly in the context of elderly, disabled parents, and the role of their adult children in caring for them, reflecting a deeper antipathy to the fact of disabled people having children. This itself reveals the assumption that disabled people are somehow inevitably the recipients of ‘care’, rather than the providers of it.

Second, excluding disabled parents from mainstream parenting agendas means that studies of disability and parenting have generally involved a search for deficits in parents and/or negative outcomes in their children. Furthermore, they underline the idea that parental impairment – rather than social disablement – is the key variable of interest. The result is a literature that is not only often weak in understanding the importance of economic and social structures in facilitating parenting, but also separates and fragments the study of disability and parenting by looking at the issue in impairment-specific chunks (such as parents with multiple sclerosis, depressed parents, visually impaired parents). It is a literature that is dominated both by clinical, or quasi-clinical, research designs, and by studies of particular ‘social problems’, again usually involving the welfare of children, which reflect more indirectly on the (quality of) parenting of disabled people. We review one such example – the construction of some disabled parents’ children as ‘young carers’ – in some detail, given the important role it has played in driving forward policy, practice and research agendas in the past decade.