Home and the social worlds beyond: exploring influences in the lives of children of mothers with intellectual disability

Abstract

The social worlds of school-aged children of mothers with intellectual disability are shaped by influences in the home that cannot be attributed exclusively to having a parent with intellectual disability. Significant adults provide an important support role and can be fulfilled by social service workers when a family-centred approach is applied.

Supporting children of parents with intellectual disability: A scoping review

“…The present authors wanted to review the grey literature to determine whether the present authors could find more research than that published in scientific databases. The present authors found Collings's doctoral thesis (), a book chapter by Faureholm (), a report by Tøssebro, Midjo, Paulsen, and Berg () and an article by Weiber, Tengland, Berglund, and Eklund () from a doctoral thesis by Weiber () that addressed issues of interest to the research question in this scoping review.…”

“…Thirteen publications that satisfied the inclusion criteria were identified: 10 empirical articles, one doctoral thesis, one report and one book chapter. One study was described across three publications (Collings, ; Collings, Grace, & Llewellyn, ; Collings, Llewellyn, & Grace, ), and a further study was described across two articles (Weiber, Eklund, & Tengland, ; Weiber, Tengland, Berglund, & Eklund, ). Overall, the review included 13 publications that referred to a total of 10 studies (Table ).…”

Family and community in the lives of UK Bangladeshi parents with intellectual disabilities

“…Such a perspective is not unique to the Bangladeshi community. Booth and Booth () proposed an idea of “distributed competence” whereby parenting and the competencies required to parent are shared throughout a network rather than inherent to one individual, and studies highlight the important contribution of grandparents (Wołowicz‐Ruszkowska & McConnell, ) and other sources of informal support in the lives of parents with intellectual disabilities (Collings, Grace, & Llewellyn, ; Collings, Llewellyn, & Grace, ; Llewellyn & Gustavsson, ). The notion of “parenting with support”, which it has been suggested should be applied to parents with intellectual disabilities, draws on similar ideas (Tarleton & Ward, ).…”

“…We suggest this is because of the way the parenting task is distributed across a network, which consists of the parent with intellectual disabilities and family members who do not have intellectual disabilities but who share values that maintain this network. An important question for services is how this model, which has been recommended elsewhere (Booth & Booth, ; Tarleton & Ward, ), can be implemented with parents with intellectual disabilities (from whatever ethnic group) who do not have such networks already in place and how services might to some extent “fill the gap” (Collings, Grace, & Llewellyn, ; Collings, Llewellyn, & Grace, ). Successful implementation of this would have vast benefits in terms of both human and service costs (Baum & Burns ).…”

The role of formal support in the lives of children of mothers with intellectual disability

“…Using ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, ), the study aimed to explore the influences, including but not limited to maternal intellectual disability, on children's social experiences. Full study results are presented elsewhere (Collings, Llewellyn & Grace, ). This study focuses on findings about how a group of school‐aged children of mothers with intellectual disability viewed the support available to them from social service workers and volunteers.…”