“SUPPORT SERVICES FOR PARENTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES”

“Never give up on something that you believe in, even if no one else believes it. You are the parent and the one that knows what is best for your child and knows what your child can achieve. Remember, progress is progress, no matter how little.”

When parents become involved with child protective services, often a care or case plan is developed by their caseworkers which sets benchmarks that parents must achieve to eitheravoid separation from or be reunified with their children. Typically, such benchmarks require parents to attend certain services – including, for example, parenting classes, rehabilitation or health care.

Research conducted both in Australia and internationally, however, highlights the scarcity of inclusive, accessible or specialised support services available to parents with disability.

As Women with Disabilities Australia observes, policy-makers and service providers have historically displayed a ‘limited understanding of accessibility’. Subsequently non-specialist services often are criticised for failing to make information available in an accessible format or ensuring that parents with disability can ‘understand and meaningfully participate in the services and programs’ offered.

Indeed, a recurrent finding is that parents who seek to access support services, either on their own initiative or following involvement with child protection services, find themselves unable to do so because such services are not available or accessible, or, if they are, have extensive waiting lists.

The paucity of services available to parents with disability generally appears to be exacerbated outside metropolitan centres, with studies reporting few specialised disability servicesor disability and culturally inclusive services available to parents in regional and remote communities. In such circumstances access to support is often contingent on people travelling vast distances, with significant associated financial, familial and cultural costs, particularly for First Nations parents living in remote communities across Australia.335 According to Victorian Legal Aid, the situation has been exacerbated for parents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Australia the significant disadvantage and systemic discrimination faced by parents with disability in accessing culturally and disability safe services has been noted for decades. The New South Wales Legislative Committee, for example, identified the deficit in service support available to parents with disability in 2002. They emphasised the need for more inclusive and accessible generic parenting programs, intensive and specialist models, while also noting the ‘virtual invisibility’ of parenting issues in existing disability services.

More recent parliamentary inquiries and civil society reviews have reached similar conclusions: disability support services do not provide or prioritise parenting support, while many parenting support services lack the capacity or specialist knowledge to either identify or address the specific and diverse needs and realities of parents with disability.

In its consultation with parents with disability in Victoria, the Parents with Disability Community Network heard that several parents who sought assistance from disability services were informed that disability services had ‘no obligation to assist a person with a disability to fulfil the parenting role if the child does not also have a disability’.

Disability and parenthood must no longer be considered in ‘silos’, as two completely distinct experiences, but rather together, so that service providers can better meet the needs identified by parents with disabilities.