Abstract
People with disabilities are deciding to be parents at increasing rates, and researchers are starting to pay attention.
In 2012, the National Council on Disability released the groundbreaking Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children report, which drew attention to the systemic discrimination that parents with disabilities face—and ways policymakers, advocates, and attorneys can work to combat it. Since then, researchers have turned their attention to studying the difficulties that disabled parents encounter in their efforts to have and raise children successfully.
Most of these studies, however, focus on mothers with disabilities, or they combine both mothers and fathers under the single category of “parents.” As a result, these studies often overlook disabled fathers’ specific needs, struggles, and experiences. But researchers at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy have worked to remedy this disparity: they’ve begun to learn about what kinds of help fathers with disabilities may need to raise their children—and how these fathers’ needs are different from those of nondisabled parents and mothers with disabilities.