Introduction

This chapter restates our commitment to a social model of disability, enabling us to identify the social and environmental barriers that disable parents. Throughout this book, we have used our data to argue that a commitment to enable, support and underpin family roles and relationships must be central to any appropriate intervention. We further stress here that, for many disabled parents, the extent to which they are able to access roles and relationships both inside and outside of the family can have an impact on how they experience the parenting role.

In reporting individual experiences of parenting we must also explicitly recognise that tensions exist between individual and collective approaches to the experience of impairment and disability. We clearly reject any solely individual approach to disability that locates the experience of disability within individuals rather than within families or wider relationships. The dominant outcome of our research has been that adequate theoretical understanding of disability and parenting is only possible within a framework that encompasses both the social and the personal factors that shape people's experiences of impairment, illness and mental distress.

This chapter is our contribution to a critique that some disabled writers (for instance, French, 1993; Crow, 1996) have made of the capacity of the social model of disability to encapsulate fully their experience of impairment, while recognising that this is not its raison d’être. In doing so, we begin to reconsider how impairment is conceptualised. Within this research we wished to compare the experiences of parents with physical impairments and parents with mental health impairments. While conducting the study, it became clear that while a mental health ‘diagnosis’ (or ‘impairment’) was one way in which distress might be defined, in any final analysis both mental health impairment (usually defined by doctors) and mental distress (that is, a personal experience) ought to be considered. This involves building on the development of social model approaches to mental health and therefore moving away from relying on a concept of ‘mental health impairment’ to a consideration of ‘mental distress’. So, as we highlighted earlier in our discussion of terminology (see page vii) we now refer primarily to mental distress.