Visible, Diverse and United:

Overall Recommendations

The Task Force divided up into five breakout sessions, each focusing on a particular issue affecting parents with disabilities and their children: Transportation; Recreation; School Systems; Parental Rights; and Programming/Support Systems. These priority issues were identified through previous surveys conducted by Through the Looking Glass as well as by meeting participants. Specific details of each of these sessions follow below. Overall, however, breakout participants stressed several overarching themes that are common to all five issues:

• Parents with disabilities and Deaf parents are a large but invisible minority within the Bay Area. This invisibility contributes to a lack of preparedness and appropriate accommodations by professionals and service systems who may be altogether unaware that there are thousands of parents with disabilities in our local communities. This invisibility also contributes to the ongoing isolation of many parents with disabilities - who have no contact with other parents with disabilities within their home communities and neighborhoods with whom to share parenting information and resources.



• Solutions must address the diversity of parents with disabilities. This diversity includes not only a wide range of parental disabilities and medical conditions, but ethnicity, language, locale (e.g., rural versus urban) as well as family configuration and age of the children. Without appropriate solutions that meet the specific needs of diverse parents with disabilities, thousands of Bay Area families will continue to be un-served and unnecessarily stressed.


• Explicit and implicit discriminatory language against parents with disabilities must be eliminated in policies and laws throughout Bay Area communities and service systems.



• Although there are generally few if any appropriate services for parents with disabilities in most Bay Area communities, ironically working parents with disabilities are less able to secure whatever services might exist because their family income levels exceed a given system or organization's financial criteria - at least on paper. However, these financial criteria do not acknowledge that many parents with disabilities must routinely spend considerable financial resources on medical, transportation, accommodation, and equipment needs.



• Service systems within the Bay Area must assess their services and clearly articulate their policies regarding parents with disabilities. Even within the same system, the existence, availability and quality of particular services to parents with disabilities and their children are highly variable across Bay Area communities. Such discrepancies create neighborhoods of haves and have-nots.



• Families with disabilities are routinely divided between systems and organizations providing services only to children/children with disabilities and those providing services only to adults/adults with disabilities. This dichotomy creates a lack of coordination of services, duplication of efforts, conflicting priorities, and is especially problematic for families that include a parent and a child with a disability. Most importantly, such divisiveness generally does not recognize the value and importance of working with the family as an intact whole.



• Service systems and organizations in Bay Area counties must begin collecting data on parents with disabilities being served. Parents with disabilities remain invisible in most of these organizations and systems, leaving unanswered whether and how many parents are actually being served by a given organization or system.


• A consistent theme across all five breakout topics was the critical need for education and training for parents with disabilities and professionals within the Bay Area. However, there are almost no funding sources for education and training concerning parenting with a disability.



• Parenting adaptations and equipment is a documented solution to several problem areas for parents with disabilities (e.g., custody, transportation, recreation). However, the lack of funding to create adaptive babycare equipment and lack of knowledge about other parenting adaptations effectively eliminates these solutions for many parents with disabilities and their children.



• Parents with disabilities need to know their rights as well as what options already exist. Because the availability and appropriateness of support and services varies so greatly throughout Bay Area communities, parents need to be educated so they can advocate for themselves - especially if the service or option already exists but is not widely known or available depending on the particular community or county.

• Introduction and Featured Presentations


• Breakout Sessions
1. Breakout Session #1: Parental Rights
2. Breakout Session #2: Recreation
3. Breakout Session #3: Parents with Disabilities and Their Child's School System
4. Breakout Session #4: Transportation
5. Breakout Session #5: Programming and Systems Change