Abstract
The lives of families who take care of people with disabilities are full of unexpected events, unwanted situations, and difficulties that accumulate at every step. Therefore, bearing in mind the purpose of this paper, I focused on determining those conditions which are a source of destabilization in the lives of families with intellectually disabled children. I attemptto reconstruct the sources of threats to the sense of subjectivity and the shaping of the identity of parents who have children with disabilities. The theoretical framework of the analysis is symbolic interactionism. The research material used in the presented article is composed of personal experiences of parents of disabled individuals, and unstructured interviews were performed with these people. Analysis of the research material was performed in accordance with the procedures of grounded theory methodology.
Highlights
The birth of a disabled child causes far-reaching changes in the lives of the whole family
The literature on the subject emphasizes that the presence of a disabled child is a source of acute stress for the entire family (Bebko et al 1987; Wolf et al 1989; Hananstein 1990; Beckman 1991; Pisula 1993)
Identity understood in such a way is a notion that connects to the subjectivity of an individual, who – according to Pietrasiński (1987: 249–271) – may be taken as “the ability to realize the fact of being subjected to transformations and influencing those transformations thanks to one’s own more or less autonomous actions.”
Summary
The lives of families who take care of people with disabilities are full of unexpected events, unwanted situations, and difficulties that accumulate at every step. Bearing in mind the purpose of this paper, I focused on determining those conditions which are a source of destabilization in the lives of families with intellectually disabled children. I attemptto reconstruct the sources of threats to the sense of subjectivity and the shaping of the identity of parents who have children with disabilities. The theoretical framework of the analysis is symbolic interactionism. The research material used in the presented article is composed of personal experiences of parents of disabled individuals, and unstructured interviews were performed with these people. Analysis of the research material was performed in accordance with the procedures of grounded theory methodology
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