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Exploring mothers’ experiences when their disabled child starts school: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Get PDFMost disabled children in England start school within a mainstream primary school environment. Research demonstrates that starting school is an important life stage for children and their families in terms of internal family dynamics and relationships with the wider community. However, there has been limited research about this experience for families with a disabled child, particularly within the English context, following the 2014 Children and Families Act. To extend the evidence base, this research explored the experiences of five mothers with disabled children as their child began mainstream primary school. The researcher adopted an insider researcher perspective, herself the mother of a disabled child. The interviews were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The mothers’ experiences are interpreted and organised around four patterns across themes: Starting school as a life stage process, ‘The System’, change and growth and belonging and rejection. The analysis focused on the mothers’ idiographic accounts and some of the patterns across accounts, both convergent and divergent, were explored. The findings indicate that starting school was a significant experience for these mothers and their families, not least negotiating the statutory processes to secure additional support. The process involved a significant investment of time and emotional labour. Mothers experienced frustration, uncertainty and power imbalance. They also shared positive changes such as new relationships, acquisition of knowledge and confidence, changed understandings and involvement in supporting other families. The findings are contextualised within relevant paradigms including the Family Life Cycle, post-crisis growth, Bordieuan capital and Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory. Opportunities for professional reflection, implications for educational psychology practice and possibilities for future research are considered
Laverne Antrobus on Woman's Hour. Dealing with family disappointment this Christmas. 21 December 2020, BBC Radio 4 [Starts at 4:10]
No full textWorking 50 years for babies and families: Child Psychotherapist Dilys Daws legacy interview
No full textIt’s not an exaggeration to say that Dilys Daws’ contribution to the field of child mental health and child psychotherapy has been immense. Spanning over five decades, her career as a Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist is notable in many respects as a clinician and shaping public opinion and government policy about the importance of infant mental health.
In the 1980’s Dilys began speaking to the public and government about the work of child psychotherapists with their patients, raising awareness of the profession and the difficulties babies and parents experience in a way that had never been done before.
Her books, such as Through the Night, which focus on the difficulties infants and parents experience , have become classics for therapists and new parents alike. Their popularity is perhaps due to the fact that they are based on fifty years of careful observation of babies and their families, many of them spent in the same baby clinic.
Dilys Daws’ writings and activities in promoting child psychotherapy are significant. In 1996 she set up the Association for Infant Mental Health UK, an interdisciplinary, not-for-profit organization, promoting understanding about infant mental health. https://aimh.uk/
It is Dilys’ ability to influence government policy and collaborate with different child professions, as well as her extraordinary clinical work which is really quite remarkable which mark her out as one of the most important child psychotherapists of her generation. Because since 1976, Dilys has been transforming the lives of children and parents in what might be to some an unconventional setting for psychotherapeutic work. Each week she has been going to the James Wigg GP Practice, in Kentish Town, London to stand by the weighing scales, observing what takes place as parents bring in their babies to be checked