“Power together”: Professionals and parents of children with disabilities creating productive partnerships

Abstract

Disparity of power and authority in the relationship between parents and professionals has been shown to be a major challenge in creating a successful partnership in caring for children with disability. The goal of this article was to evaluate workshops attended by professionals and parents of children with disability by raising awareness to barriers related to incompatible expectations and role definitions. The research explored the experiences of the participants in order to identify factors that facilitated or impeded their collaborations. Data were collected from three workshops attended by 22 mothers of children with disability and 24 professionals (most of them are social workers). This qualitative research used interpretative phenomenological analysis to investigate the participants' experiences. Findings showed that parents and professionals joined forces to create a productive working relationship by taking advantage of power over and power together relationships. This mutual process required participants to be aware, empathic, and respectful of one another's needs and limitations; acknowledge the contribution of experiential and professional knowledge; and co-operate in overcoming the effects of ineffective bureaucratic service systems.Interventions geared to contain emotional burden, acknowledge differential knowledge and experience, and structure the use of power are suggested. KEYWORDSparents of children with disability, partnerships between parents and professionals, power embedded strategies: power over, oppression, co-operation, and collusive power, professionals working with parents of children with disability

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“…Implications for Future Study. While parents of children with disabilities may benefit from involvement in coproduction processes, they tend to experience unique barriers to doing so (Cohen & Mosek, 2019). Government policy has a critical role in generating the conditions under which families of children with disabilities participate in coproduction processes.…”

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“…Research on the ways that families adjust to disabled family members has been developed since 1950s and sustained till the present time (Cohen and Mosek 2019 ; Seligman 1999 ). Early studies affirmed that family members were thought to be devastated by childhood disability (McCabe 2007 ; Neely-Barnes and Dia 2008 ).…”

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