domingo, 19 de junio de 2016

Parenting with a Disability: A New Frontier of Disability Rights


June 17, 2016

Parenting with a Disability: A New Frontier of Disability Rights

By Megan Kirshbaum, PhD, Founder and Executive Director, Through the Looking Glass
Through the Looking Glass (TLG) is a nationally recognized center that has pioneered research, training, and services for parents with diverse disabilities and their families. Advancing the rights of parents with disabilities is included in the work of many programs and grantees within ACL, TLG is one example.  
As many families celebrate Father’s Day today, it is important to remember people with disabilities still often face profound familial, legal, medical and societal barriers to parenthood. 
An estimated 4.1 million parents in the United States are parents with disabilities. Founded in 1982, TLG’s work has been about the transition to parenthood–a beautiful and profound experience –but also a stressful transition for most parents and couples with or without a disability.  It is a transition that benefits from extra supports.
In the early years of TLG, it was a common complaint of parents with disabilities that the transition was more difficult because of the lack of role models; fortunately this has changed, particularly with the help of communication through social media.  Many parents can extrapolate from their expertise working around other barriers, and bring their problem-solving ingenuity to the new realm of parenthood.
For parents with vision or physical disabilities, including pain or fatigue, TLG has found over the past 25 years, that babycare adaptations and adaptive strategies can ease the transition to parenthood, preventing the tendency to over-stress the body and making babycare more enjoyable. 
It’s important for parents to anticipate social barriers they may face in putting together supports.  From the beginning of TLG we found that parents with disabilities who had the means to fund extra supports for parenting, such as babycare adaptations or personal assistance or accessible vans, had a smoother transition into parenthood than those who were living in poverty.  There is still a critical lack of publically funded resources for low-income parents with disabilities and their children. 
One of the most alarming barriers to parenting for people with disabilities is the heightened risk of having custody of a child challenged or removed based on bias regarding a parent’s disability status.  

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