2012 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Families and ‘Carers’
We would like to begin this chapter by recognizing that to cover all the relevant issues would require another book and we have had to take a particular focus. The title of the chapter signals such a broad arena that it raises the realization that disability touches all our lives. There are numerous situations which we do not directly address here but which you may encounter and will need to follow up. These include the experiences of ageing parents of disabled adults, partner/spousal carers, and families caring for older disabled people. Life course transitions is also a major topic and we deal only with transition to adulthood in this chapter. If you have a particular interest in this topic, you will find Priestley (2001) useful. We focus here on the experiences of parents of disabled children, with the hope that the issues raised are generalizable to experiences of other groups signalled by the title of this chapter. We begin by considering the concept of ‘carer’.