Disabled Parenting
The school system is not designed to support families when the caregiver is disabled or chronically ill. These posts reflect on institutional ableism, neuronormative bias, and the systemic erasure of disabled parents in education. What happens when the person writing the emails, attending the meetings, and asking for help also needs accommodations to participate fully? Here, we trace the invisible labour of disabled caregiving—exhausting, ingenious, and often ignored. The Disabled Parenting Project (DPP), part of the National Research Center for Parents with Disabilities, is a community-led initiative that shares lived experience, challenges systemic discrimination, and generates policy-relevant research by and for disabled parents—including those navigating neurodivergence.
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What families learn from the inside of exclusion
We weren’t trained for this. We were not briefed, warned, or prepared. We entered the public school system, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like most parents do—with trust, with hope, and with a belief, however weathered, in the promise that schools would try to do right by our children. What we didn’t understand was how quickly that…
