Dear All,
Belated thanks to all who replied to my request for information about
children growing up in a household with their parents' carers/personal
assistants. I was very intereted to hear about Claudia's work.
I will contact the Booths and the Ann Craft Trust directly, but I'm not
sure if they have conducted any specific research addressing my question.
Actually I was wondering if there was research from families where a
parent is physically disabled and where a paid worker would be doing a
fair bit of hands-on child care. Some accounts I have read written by
disabled parents don't go into this in much detail. Maybe it's hard
enough being taken seriously as a parent and there might be a feeling that
describing how a worker might be a key part of the household be taken
as 'proof' that the disabled parent is redundant...
Incidentally, I do know of quite a few Bangladeshi families where I work
in East London where a parent has a learning disability and another family
member (usually the grandmother, but also a husband or wife) does a lot of
childcare). However, I really want to consider cases where the support
comes from paid workers.
In the court work I do I come across the assumption that for parents to
have to rely on publicly funded support in their homes is a bad thing -
too expensive and bad for children to boot. This seems to me to link to
underlying beliefs that children 'belong' to and are the responsibility of
their parents, that mothers are 'naturally' the ones who are going to be
spending most time taking care of children, and that other arrangments are
likely to damage children's development. So this seems to me pretty
oppressive to children as well as disabled parents (and women).
Nevertheless, I am aware that within a legal context these sorts of ideas
don't have much space, thus my request for some research info.
Thanks again
Deborah
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