Families of Handicapped Persons: Research, Programs, and Policy Issues

Baltimore, Maryland: Paul H. Brookes Publising Company, 1986. Assumed First Edition . Trade Paperback. Very Good. 7" x 10. 307 Pages Indexed. Previous owner's name is at the top of the half-title page. This book on the families of handicapped children emerged from a conference sponsored by the Mental retardation/Developmental Disabilities Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in cooperation with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each year NICHD picks a topic that has great research potential and popular interest in the field of mental retardation and developmental disabilities and brings together professionals who have been working on this issue. These scientists, often from multidisciplinary backgrounds, are asked to review current trends and project future productive directions. This volume compiles the conference papers that "addressed a wide range of issues concerning the adaptation problems of families who must cope with many pressures, on a daily basis, with their handicapped children. There is little doubt that the family has become an increasing focus of attention as professionals try to cope with the problem of how to help children with mental retardation and developmental disabilities. In this latter part of the 20th century, the family remains the core unit within the society within which individual crises are most often coped. This fact remains true despite the undeniable shifting of traditional roles within the family that has taken place in the past century. Each of these patterns carries a different set of roles for family members to learn and act on. One element of the family-child adaptation to be researched is the nature and perspective of the family unit itself, as well as that of the child-in this case, the handicapped child. The various attempts that are made to cope with the presence of a young handicapped child or individual in the family unit is the focus of this volume. This topic has become increasingly important in the last two generations with the evolution of social policy in the United States regarding handicapped individuals. It is within the living memory of many of us that the predominant and approved response to having a moderately to severely handicapped child was to place him or her out of the family in a large institutional setting that was often built far away from urban centers. The family crisis in those days was how to adapt to the discarding of one of its members. New information and experience from both education and the social sciences provided the basis for a changed societal attitude. One of the fundamental findings was that most of these handicapped individuals were not doomed to a life of dependency or helplessness.