Child Welfare, Family Law, and the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Families

This study examines the life circumstances of parents with disabilities involved with the child welfare system, with a focus on parents from racial and ethnic minority groups. Parents with disabilities in the child welfare system have a higher risk of inadequate housing, domestic abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and financial struggles when compared to parents in the child welfare system who don't have a disability. In addition, Black and Hispanic parents with disabilities have a higher risk of these circumstances than those who are in the same racial or ethnic group but don't have any disabilities.

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This compilation of sources shows the significant increase in recent years in attention by researchers and practitioners to the issue of the involvement of parents with disabilities in the child welfare system.

Disabled parents—particularly, parents with intellectual disabilities—are reported to the child welfare system at higher rates than nondisabled parents. To learn how parents with intellectual disabilities become involved with the child protection system, researchers studied who is making these reports to the child welfare system and whether substantiation rates for parents and caregivers with intellectual disabilities vary depending on who referred them to the child welfare system.

Parents with disabilities are routinely discriminated against in the child welfare, family law, and adoption and foster care systems. Over the past few decades, advocates, activists, and legislators have urged states to pass legislation protecting disabled parents. Many states have introduced or passed legislation to protect the rights of parents with disabilities and their children. However, though states are increasingly likely to pass such legislation, there are 22 states that still lack comprehensive protections for parents with disabilities. This study seeks to understand the obstacles that advocates, attorneys, and legislators face when they try to pass laws that protect the rights of parents with disabilities and identify solutions for passing laws that protect parents with disabilities and their children. 

Parents with disabilities are no more likely than other parents to abuse or neglect their children, but they are disproportionately more likely to interact with the child-protection system than their nondisabled counterparts. The beliefs of mandated reporters, such as teachers and doctors, about the inability of people with disabilities to raise children, have contributed to this overrepresentation. There is, however, very little research that has examined how often child-protection cases involving parents with disabilities are substantiated. (Substantiated child-protection cases have enough evidence to be investigated, but they may or may not result in charges of abuse.)