Schemes to help parents who have a learning disability work best if the parents are helped from the time the child is born, have practical and emotional support and can learn parenting skills at home.
Health and social services staff need to work together to support parents.
Until recently it was generally thought that people with learning disabilities were not capable of bringing up children. When their children were born, they were often taken into care at or soon after the birth. Recent research now suggests that people with learning disabilities can be effective parents. This is more likely if they have mild learning disabilities, had good parenting themselves and do not have any mental health problems. Previous assumptions, often based on stereotypical views, are being challenged.
The experiences of parents with learning disabilities have been that:
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they are at risk of having their children removed and their parental responsibilities terminated on the basis of evidence that would not be applied to a non-disabled parent;
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they are likely to have their parenting skills judged more harshly than other parents;
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services tend to emphasise parents’ deficits rather than focusing on their abilities and presume that they are incapable of parenting because of their learning disabilities;
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family and child care problems are often put down to the parent’s learning disabilities and fail to take account of wider social and environmental factors such as poverty and poor housing and shortcomings in support services;
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services which are discriminatory or unresponsive to their needs add a further burden to people whose coping abilities are already stretched and can lead to the situation breaking down;
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the administrative division between child/family services and learning disability services makes it hard for parents to access the expertise and support of the former.
Support for parents in the UK is still very patchy, but some excellent projects have been established which enable families to remain intact by offering practical and psychological support.
Evidence from existing schemes suggests that support for parents with learning disabilities should be:
- flexibly tailored to meet individual needs and circumstances;
- available at an early stage, rather than when a crisis occurs;
- non-judgemental and non-threatening, which can be easier when the scheme is at arm’s length from statutory services;
- based on a shared understanding between workers and families about standards of care and good-enough parenting;
- offering parents intensive and continuous training in parenting and domestic skills, which needs to be delivered in the home;
- offering consistent personal support through a relationship based on trust and friendship;
- supporting the whole family, while also focusing on the needs of individuals within that family.
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