Women who sacrifice themselves for everybody: qualitative research with mothers of disabled children

This study, from a feminist perspective, aimed at examining the experiences of women whose children with cerebral palsy received a treatment at a physiotherapy and rehabilitation center located in Ankara, Turkey. The study intended to reveal the perceptions of in-family roles of women with disabled children, their participation in public life, and their self-concept within the scope of feminist social work. Thus, the objective of the present study was to contribute to the understanding of the fact that non gender-blind services should be developed in this field on the basis of social justice and human rights, which constitutes the fundamental philosophy of social work. Qualitative research method was employed in the study where data were analyzed through content analysis. The findings of the study were interpreted under four main themes: the lives of the women with disabled children after their disabled children were born; being a woman within the scope of family life, participation in decision-making processes, and domestic division of labor; participation in public life and relations with women's associations; the self-sacrifice; and the suggestions of women concerning self-realization within the scope of self-concept.     

Application of the International classification of functioning,disability and health in Taiwan: victory of the medical model

Since July 2012, eligibility for disability benefits and services in Taiwan has been assessed based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. This study examines disabled people’s experiences of this new assessment system: does it incorporate the social model or a multidimensional understanding of disability and assess the needs of disabled people adequately? In-depth interviews were employed with 24 disabled persons to answer these questions from the perspective of disabled people. The findings show that the new assessment model is still medicalised: social roles and social participation are not considered, the assessment process is dominated by professionals, users’ perspectives are not included and only those who are assessed to have a high level of disability are satisfied with the new system while many others would prefer the old assessment system. These findings have relevance for the analysis of needs assessments of disabled people in different countries.     

A study of disabled children and child protection in Scotland — A hidden group?

This paper is based on analysis of data collected for a study, commissioned by the Scottish Government, which examined child protection work with disabled children. At a conceptual level, the paper draws on Goffman's frame analysis and on different models of disability. Focus groups were conducted with five Child Protection Committees (40 individuals) and semi-structured interviews with a further 21 practitioners from social work, education, health services, third sector organisations and the police. The findings show that, for various reasons, abuse of disabled children may go undetected. Where it is suspected, effective action does not always follow, for example, where practitioners over-empathise with parents. When child protection work is undertaken, disabled children may remain relatively invisible in terms of participation and professional focus. It is suggested that the ways in which practitioners and managers “frame” disabled children has implications for how abuse is responded to and how well these children are protected. Participants also “framed” disability in different ways, and it is suggested that a social relational model seems particularly applicable. In conclusion, in many respects disabled children experiencing abuse may remain absent from or to some extent hidden within child protection services in Scotland. While some creative work is taking place, considerable changes are required to make child protection services accessible to all disabled children, sensitive to their needs and respectful of their rights.     

Public health policy and social support for immigrant mothers raising disabled children in Canada

A literature review regarding the social support of immigrant mothers of disabled children in Canada was undertaken with a focus on settings where supports need to be shored up. An integrative review of published papers and policy reports concerning key aspects of social supports for immigrant mothers and disabled children was undertaken. Immigrant mothers experience numerous barriers to social supports for themselves and their disabled children. Maternal immigrant populations experience unique challenges in the setting of childhood disability as well as the challenges of mothers in the dominant culture. There are negative impacts on maternal health as a result of inadequate policy offerings. Public health policy needs to be refashioned in light of weak systems and supports for both immigrant mothers and disabled children and to acknowledge that the current system poses concerning implications for the long-term health of both groups.     

Repositioning mothers: mothers,disabled children and disability studies

In this article we set out to review the ways in which mothers of disabled children have been portrayed within disability studies and the more broader academic literature. We argue that within disability studies mothers of disabled children occupy a liminal position because they are often not disabled and yet they can experience forms of disablism. Their experiences can differ markedly from the experiences of mothers of non‐disabled children and yet the consequences and outcomes of these experiences, such as developing a ‘special competence’ is largely overlooked. Mothers can work to effect change on behalf of their children and, in some cases, for disabled people more generally, however, this role of activist mother is largely undervalued. The review of literature presented here leads us to conclude that further research needs to be undertaken exploring and highlighting the ways in which mothers of disabled children negotiate, manage and approach their daily lives, operating within what are described by feminist scholars as oppressive mothering ideologies and disabling environments.     

Social work students field training as an opportunity to develop best practice in disabilities: the case of Jordan

This article outlines an innovative field for training efforts that foster the abilities of undergraduate social work students so that they are able to empower local communities in disability issues. It discusses the contribution of social work education in improving livelihoods of families with disabled members, challenging families as well as attitudes of local communities towards the disabled. Social work students were placed in a centre for children with developmental disabilities for a period of eight months. At this stage of their training, students were required to demonstrate their skills in working with individuals, families and communities. They were also required to identify opportunities for interventions that addressed stigma and social inclusion. Key outcomes from students’ voices were captured through their field notes, some limited observations and focus group discussions. The field training demonstrated that students managed to establish a support group for mothers with disabled children to provide a safe place to share their experiences. Student outcomes highlighted that the field experience was effective and feedback from families indicated that training raises disability awareness and facilitates women’s access to existing support systems. In addition, it engages professionals and families to work together in developing a long-term strategy to reduce isolation and exclusion, as well as to tackle health and social inequalities in Jordan.     

Combining Dyslexia and Mothering: Perceived Impacts on Work

Previous studies have provided an insight into the lives of disabled mothers, but little attention has been paid to disabled working mothers. This paper draws on interviews with women who had a formal diagnosis of dyslexia, to discuss: particular difficulties when combining work and mothering; the perceived positive impacts on work and education, of becoming a mother; unsupportive managers; what some mothers found helpful in order to maintain work; and the diversity between experiences. We conclude that for those already on a career path before having children, some of their experiences could have been seen as an amplification of what other working mothers face. However, a difference was that the added time taken up with mothering meant they became more vulnerable to ‘exposing’ their impairment at work. In contrast, for dyslexic women who were yet to attain a high status in education and work, motherhood encouraged them to initiate their career.     

Short Break and Respite Services for Disabled Children in England: Comparing Children's and Parents' Perspectives of Their Impact on Children

Researchers, health and social care workers often seek to understand the perspectives of children; but gathering views directly from children can present difficulties. Parents are often asked to provide accounts of children's feelings or opinions on the assumption that their proxy reports are accurate and unproblematic. This qualitative thematic analysis of open‐question responses from 352 parents and 73 disabled children examines their accounts of the impact of short break services on disabled children. Participants' perspectives differed; children tended to describe immediate outcomes such as enjoying activities and participation; parents acknowledged these, but focused on longer term developmental outcomes for children.     

Social and family responsibility or self-interest?

Mothers’ increasing labour market participation is posed as a key aspect of a growing trend towards individualization — both for ill and for good. In ‘for ill’ versions, mothers’ employment is regarded as undermining commitment to family relationships and leading to a loss of community. In ‘for good’ versions, family and community relationships become contingent upon values of equality and respect. ‘Preference theory’ modifies the individualization thesis, with a posited distinction between mothers in full-time employment with ‘work-centred’ identities and those with part-time work who want ‘adaptive’ or ‘home-centred’ identities. This paper examines such issues, drawing on qualitative case study research on mothers employed full and part time in a hospital and an accountancy firm in the UK. It considers how the variable work ethos of organizations, and the ways mothers engage with these, can interact with their engagement in family and community relationships. In particular, it suggests that employment can be as much about social obligation in a local community, and commitment and obligations to family, as about individualized self-provision and options.     

Living with dying and disabilism: death and disabled children

This paper explores the ‘offensive presence’ death has sometimes represented in disability studies. The paper focuses on interviews with three mothers of children with the label of life‐limiting and life‐threatening impairments and positions their experiences within the current policy context for disabled children in England. The narratives are part of a wider on‐going study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council ‘Does Every Child Matter, post‐Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods’ (RES‐062‐23‐1138). Findings include: (i) families experience social isolation and poverty; (ii) support from services is lacking and/or inappropriate; (iii) families worry about the future and the (physical, social and emotional) costs of care. The paper concludes by suggesting that social oppression theories of disability have much to offer in terms of challenging the disadvantage disabled children and their families’ experience during life and in death.     

Time for justice: safeguarding the rights of disabled children

This article reviews two core strategies for safeguarding the rights of disabled children and examines the extent to which these processes advance justice for children in accessing an inclusive and equitable education. The article evaluates the adequacy of the legal system in the face of increased evidence of exclusionary practices of schools, and the low uptake of the disability tribunal as a vehicle for redressing discriminatory practices. It reviews the work undertaken with schools to develop procedures and processes to support them in identifying disabled pupils in order to monitor the impact of their policies and practices. Although there were some limitations, this work provided a platform from which to ensure that schools engaged with their responsibilities and understood more about the ways in which a child’s impairment impacted on their participation in school life. Instead we are dependent on the work of voluntary associations to safeguard children’s rights.     

Doing research with children and young people who do not use speech for communication

Despite emphasis in policy on participation of disabled children,¹ we still know relatively little about how to obtain the views of disabled children with significant communication impairment and their views are often overlooked in planning and service provision. This article describes how the views of children who do not use speech were accessed in research aiming to identify disabled children and young people's priorities regarding outcomes of social care and support services. The main challenge was to develop a method that was reliable, non‐threatening, enjoyable and relevant to individual children, as well as enabling children to think beyond their everyday life and express what they aspire to.     

Work Choices of Mothers in Families with Children with Disabilities

This study used a sample of single and married mothers with children under the age of 20 drawn from the 1992 and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine one facet of the economic implications a child with disabilities brings to a family. Specifically, the choice of women with children to work full time, part time, or not at all was estimated as a function of individual and family characteristics, including the number and ages of children with disabilities. The presence of young children, with or without disabilities, has a significant negative influence on the work choice of both single and married mothers. However, once children enter elementary school, single mothers with disabled or nondisabled children and married mothers with nondisabled children are significantly more likely to enter the labor market or increase their labor market hours than are married mothers of school‐age children with disabilities.     

Young persons as epistemological agents in social work assessment and intervention

SummaryLiterature debates whether young persons' participation in social work decisions is tokenistic in nature or it empowers them to shape their world. By and large, young persons deemed at risk remain the targets of intervention. This paper aims to underscore the need to move beyond soliciting young persons' voice merely in order to corroborate information provided by adults and professionals in social work assessment and intervention. Instead, it explicates the philosophical foundation for social workers to treat young persons as knowledgeable agents capable of contributing to professional knowledge.FindingsThrough reinterpretation of a published case study on children of sex worker mothers in India, this paper highlights how young persons are active agents of their own lives even in extreme dire situations. These children of sex worker mothers were capable of advocating for their own rights as well as that of their mothers. Through the secondary analysis of data, we illustrated the dynamic process of knowledge construction by young persons.ApplicationBy paying attention to the young persons' capacity as knowledgeable agents we propose social workers to intentionally incorporate their knowledge in their practice.     

残疾儿童心理健康内涵及结构初探

心理健康是儿童生活和健康成长的保障,相较于普通儿童,在某些方面具有障碍或缺陷的残疾儿童更容易出现情绪和行为问题,其心理健康状况堪忧,迫切需要得到更多的关注和有效的干预.本文基于心理健康的概念和标准,结合残疾儿童的身心发展特点,厘清了残疾儿童心理健康的内涵,其实质是努力达成残疾儿童与外界环境的适度平衡和内心的和谐,即良好的社会适应.在此基础上,从社会适应心理机能的活动领域和特质内容两个维度入手,初步构建出残疾儿童心理健康的五领域(自我意识、人际交往、学习适应、生活适应、社会支持)与三内容(认知、情绪情感、意志行为)相交叉的二维结构模型,为进一步开展残疾儿童心理健康教育的实践工作奠定理论基础.     

When “Best I Can” is Not Enough: Welfare Managers’ Appraisal of Clients’ Mothering Practices

The “mommy wars” are a cultural narrative of conflict between mothers that amplifies the scrutiny placed on mothering practices. While mothers at all social locations face criticisms for their choices surrounding parenting, mothers in poverty lack the resources to enact many socially mandated parenting practices and contend with additional scrutiny through participation in programs like welfare-to-work. In this project, I examine the parenting expectations mothers on welfare must navigate. I use 69 semi-structured interviews with welfare-to-work program managers in Ohio from 2010-2011 to examine which mothering ideologies they encourage and discourage clients to adopt. I find that managers are highly critical of clients’ (perceived) parenting practices and instead promote a combination of intensive mothering and economic nurturing. Managers promote intensive mothering and meeting children's needs—so long as it does not interfere with the work requirements of the program. Economic nurturing simultaneously allows managers to express concern for children and promote clients participating in the work requirements of OWF, implying that work and family needs are aligned and can be met via work.     

The cost of caregiving: wage loss among caregivers of elderly and disabled adults and children with special needs

Sixty-one percent of the adults caring for elderly and disabled family members and 53% of parents of children with special needs are employed. Yet studies examining the experience of employed caregivers of children with special needs and elderly or disabled adult family members have not examined the impact on earnings or the workplace policies that might help reduce the conflicts between work and caregiving. This study begins to fill this gap using data from a nationally representative US survey of American adults. We find that employees who live with a child with a health problem are 48% more likely to have lost wages. Each adult with health issues that an employee is responsible for raises the chances of wage loss by 29%. At the same time, access to paid leave for family health needs reduces the likelihood of wage loss by 30%, and having a supportive supervisor reduces the odds of experiencing wage loss by 37%. Implications for employers and US policy-makers are discussed.     

Disability,personalisation and community arts: exploring the spatial dynamics of children with disabilities participating in inclusive music classes*

This paper uses personalisation and the capabilities approach to explore inclusive music classes for children with disabilities in Scotland. It provides a unique insight into the impact of participation through the voices of the disabled young musicians, their parents and tutors. The study highlights the power of inclusive spaces to transform lives, to build confidence and contest disabled identities. It engages in the spatial dynamic of opening up inclusive spaces, as well as exposing emerging tensions in the liminal space that is created through movement between safe and supported spaces and the antithesis, spaces that disempower and marginalise. The findings suggest good practice around personalisation, when conceived of from a social justice perspective, as a template for working with other marginalised groups and in other professional settings.     

Local Day Care Quality and Maternal Employment: Evidence From East and West Germany

By investigating how locally available early childhood education and care quality relates to maternal employment choices, this study extends the literature, which mostly has focused on the importance of day care availability or costs. The authors provide differentiated analyses by the youngest child's age and for West and East Germany to examine moderating influences, such as work‐care cultures, in a market with strongly state‐subsidized provision and near‐universal participation of preschool children. The empirical analysis linked the Socio‐Economic Panel and the Families in Germany Study for 2010 and 2011 (N = 3,301 mothers) with regional structural quality data and applied multivariate regression models. In East Germany, mothers with a child under age 3 years who lived in districts with smaller day care groups were more likely to be employed and to extend their work hours. For mothers in West Germany and those with older children, day care quality was not significantly related to employment.     

Time,Work, and Family Life: Reconceptualizing Gendered Time Patterns Through the Case of Children’s Organized Activities1

This article considers the understudied phenomenon of children’s organized leisure as it relates to the division of labor in the family. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we first ask whether the labor entailed by children’s organized leisure is divided evenly between mothers and fathers. Both data sets indicate that this is not the case, with the majority of the work falling to mothers; they also indicate that at least some employed mothers face a tradeoff between time devoted to paid work and time devoted to facilitating their children’s leisure. Subsequently, we consider key qualitative aspects of these leisure activities, including deadline sensitivity, authority over scheduling, and degree of predictability. These factors, we find, serve to exacerbate the inequity of the allocation of responsibility between mothers and fathers. We conclude by suggesting that organized leisure has become an important part of the familial landscape and thus warrants further attention. We also suggest that research on the gender division of labor would be enhanced in important ways by greater attention to qualitative dimensions of time use. Researchers should not simply assume that “an hour is an hour.”