ABSTRACT
'Social factors' are important in the identification and assessment of both mental subnormality and physical disability, and in neither case can the behaviour of the disabled directly attributed to some underlying pathology. An adequate account of the apparent normality of the situation of parents with disabled children as presented by them is not then to be sought in the imputation of psychological states, nor in the imposition of social factors which might produce them. Given that the facts of disability are regarded as independent of the effects, or parents' responses to them, the research problem is one of categorizing parents' responses in relation to them. In 1964 H. Kelman pointed to the consensus in the literature that the effects of a disabled child are necessarily 'noxious'. The continuing assumption of pathology in family life is evident in the quotation or in the following: 'The family is slowed up in its affectional and emotion-satisfying performances'.
