Why live together? The stories of co-living parents and adult children with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

Independence is highly valued in Swedish disability politics. Consequently, most adult people with intellectual disabilities live in group homes. Yet there are also adult people with intellectual disabilities who live with their parents. Why? In this study, eight parents with adult children in the home and three adults with intellectual disabilities who live with their parents are interviewed. These families deviate from the discourse on how support and service to people with disabilities should be carried out. There is a mixture of formal and informal support as well as paid and unpaid support. It diverges from norms attached to how Swedish families with adult children should be constructed and how relationships between parents and adult children should be expressed. In contrast to other studies, the parents are quite satisfied with the societal support they get. Instead, the parents’ reasons for living together are related to a sense of duty and the ability to give their children ‘a good life’ and a social context. Another motive might be that the parents don’t ascribe their grown up children the status of adulthood.

Keywords:

• Disability
• family studies
• interview studies
• social welfare
• exclusion/inclusion