Families torn apart

For disabled parents, having their children taken into care is all too often the first resort for social services, who are failing to offer the right support to keep families together. Elizabeth Choppin investigates

Mark Mosley and his wife Deborah, from Walsall, feel like they have had their lives yanked out from under them.

The couple, who have learning difficulties, were devastated when their three children – Hayley, Carol Ann and Christopher – were taken into care almost ten years ago. They were told by social services that it was a child protection matter.

“I still feel very upset. I wish we had received more services,” says Deborah (below). “Social services is all mouth. They don’t follow through with anything except when they say they’re going to take your kids away. They follow through with that.”

“They said I had no parenting skills and that I didn’t know how to bring my children up,” adds Mark. He believes more should have been done to keep the family together because he and his wife were never given a chance to fulfil their roles as parents.

According to government policy, disabled parents should be provided with the support needed to bring up their children. In practice, however, this does not always happen.

Statistics published by the Norah Fry Research Centre in 2006 show that 48 per cent of parents with learning difficulties who were interviewed were not looking after their own children.

About 12 per cent of Britain’s 14.1 million parents are disabled. They are far more likely to be unemployed and living in low-income households than non-disabled parents.

The grim reality is that many disabled people with children are up against exceptional challenges in the form of lack of support, unfair assessments, negative assumptions, inaccessible services and in some cases, the break-up of their families.

One of the core issues, say experts, is that many disabled parents do not appear on the radar of support services until the situation has reached a crisis stage.

After the kids went into care, Mark says that social workers “didn’t bother with them anymore” or try to reunite the family.

“I never had a chance and I know I’m speaking for a lot of parents who’ve got the same thing,” says Mark. “I’ve got nothing left to live for, really. It just strips your life of everything.”

But statistics show that the Mosleys’ circumstances are far from unique.

Philipa Bragman, director of Change, an advocacy group for parents with learning difficulties in Leeds, says that she has never met a parent with learning difficulties who has not been faced with these issues.

Yet the problems are not limited to parents with learning difficulties. Examples of disabled parents struggling to keep their families together arise with alarming frequency.

In January, a teenage mother from Nottingham with mental health issues was embroiled in a legal battle with social services after her baby had been removed from her care hours after he was born – then later returned following a ruling from a high court judge. The baby has now been removed again, pending another court hearing.

Lynn Cook*, from Cheshire, has epilepsy and was limited to seeing her newborn twin boys only 27 hours a week until they were a year-and-a-half old. She has had to fight to receive overnight care so the boys can now be with her.

She says the twins would have been put up for adoption if her sister had not been able to step in and look after the boys for more than a year.

“I felt I was treated unfairly because they weren’t giving me the chance to prove that I was fit as a mother,” she says.

A woman from Lambeth, who has congenital limb shortening, was so distraught trying to look after her new baby without support from social services that she considered asking a neighbour to report that she was a negligent parent in order to get the help she needed. She took every route available, including asking the Disabled Parents Network (DPN) to write to social services on her behalf and also involving a local councillor, all to no avail.

Simone Baker, vice-chair of the DPN and herself a disabled parent, says: “Fairly often, anybody that seeks support, whatever the nature of their impairment, will find that social services seem to wade in from the angle of child protection rather than with the idea that this is a disabled person who requires support in their parenting role.”

Disabled parents do often put off asking for help, says Baker, because they are afraid of being judged or of having their children taken away.

A framework of support needs to be put in place for the benefit of disabled parents before their children are born, she insists.

Baker says DPN is constantly made aware of situations where disabled parents are struggling to get help after the birth of their children – and 60 per cent of those calls are from lone parents who only get in touch when things have become too much.

Another issue, says Baker, is that assessments of disabled parents are often based on their needs as a single disabled person, which doesn’t properly take into account what help is required after the person becomes a parent.

Constance Reid*, from Preston, has restricted growth and was told that because she was independent before the birth of her son, she wouldn’t need help afterwards.

“They had very little experience of disabled parents and they didn’t know about the day-to-day issues,” she says. “Even though I didn’t need support in a lot of areas, there were areas where I really did need it.”

It wasn’t until Reid contacted her local MP that she was granted two days of care a week. “They wouldn’t have considered it otherwise, I really do believe that,” she adds.

“Once people get to the stage of not being able to look after their baby is when social services would step in,” says Baker. “But a family in tatters is going to cost the government a lot more money than if there had been support from the start.”

Experts also say that mainstream services for new parents – such as parent help-lines, baby clinics and parenting support classes – do not have a good record of being accessible to people with a range of access needs.

Although we asked someone from the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services to comment on the issue of support for disabled parents, no-one was available to speak to us.

Alison Woodhead, director of the Mencap Parents Advocacy Project in Walsall, says disabled parents are facing the threat of their families being split up all over the country. “Children’s services become involved and it becomes a child protection issue. It’s at this point that we’re told they need an advocate to understand the issues. But at that point, it’s too late and there is very little we can do,” she says. It is easy for people to slip through the cracks, she adds.

Parents with mild learning difficulties are especially vulnerable because they will probably not have been eligible for support and therefore will not have been picked up by the system.

“We try to get to families before there are problems,” says Woodhead. “We work with health services and any organisation that is working with children and families to make their information accessible. That has helped.”

She adds: “Not every parent can look after their child but we try and help where there is a threat to remove them because of their disability. It’s an issue of support and not an issue of whether they can be a parent.”

New guidelines on the rights of disabled parents from the Department of Health are slowly being recognised, she says, but each region needs an advocacy programme for disabled parents.

“Change is not going to happen without outside pressure,” she says.

In 2006, the Social Care Institute for Excellence published a knowledge review on support for disabled parents. Jenny Morris, author of the review, has also been leading the Office for Disability Issues’ Independent Living Review and a cross-government Independent Living Strategy, which is expected to be published shortly.

She says: “Disabled parents are one important group that the strategy will cover. We talked to parents to help us develop our policy proposals and they told us how important it is that they get equal access to mainstream services like health visitors and midwives but also about the additional support they might need.

“The Independent Living Strategy will seek to deliver the kinds of things non-disabled people take for granted, and that includes an equal chance to be a parent.”

* Not their real names