Navigating the joys, stigma, and discrimination of disabled parenting—and how the solutions offered by disability culture can transform the way we all raise our kids
Jessica Slice’s disability is exactly what her child needed as a newborn. After becoming disabled a handful of years prior from a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Jessica had done the hard work of disentangling her worth from productivity and learning how to prepare for an unpredictable and fragile world. Despite evidence to the contrary, nondisabled people and systems often worry that disabled people cannot keep kids safe and cared for, labeling disabled parents “unfit,” but disabled parents and culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.
Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents. From expensive or nonexistent adaptive equipment to inaccessible healthcare and schools to the terror of parenting while disabled in public and threat of child protective services, Slice uncovers how disabled parents, out of necessity, must reject the rules and unrealistic expectations that all parents face. She writes about how disabled parents are often more prepared than nondisabled parents to navigate the uncertainty of losing control over bodily autonomy. In doing so, she highlights the joy, creativity, and radical acceptance that comes with being a disabled parent.
While disabled parents have been omitted from mainstream parenting conversations, Slice argues that disabled bodies and minds give us the hopeful perspectives and solutions we need for transforming a societal system that has left parents exhausted, stuck, and alone.
“This is such a glorious, revelatory book. Jessica Slice cuts through all the judgment and stereotypes to reveal the truth: disabled people are, in many ways, uniquely suited to and skilled at parenthood and are sources of wisdom, ingenuity, courage, and joy that the entire world can learn from. I am a nondisabled man with no children and I gained so much from this book.”
—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of An Immense World
“Unfit Parent is a love letter to disabled parenting—an impeccably researched, reported, and referenced love letter—as well as an artfully drawn map of an exquisite, convivial society that can only be achieved with the creativity, skill, and joy of disabled people. Jessica Slice bends our beliefs about bodies and reorients us toward our need for one another, the messy beauty of our interconnectedness.”
—Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother
“This vulnerable, insightful, and thoughtful book is a must-read for any parent seeking a map for how to care for their children—while also caring for their own needs—with creativity, community, and joy. It made me reflect on my own parenting and deeply held beliefs. A gift.”
—Rachel Somerstein, journalist and author of Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section
“An absorbing portrayal of what it’s really like to be a disabled parent, including the shocking and understudied discrimination they face. In rigorously researched and open-hearted prose, Slice illuminates the joys and pains of disabled parenting, arriving at the crucial revelation: the skillset of being disabled is far from disqualifying and is, in fact, uniquely well-tuned to the demands of parenting. Unfit Parent is a fierce, compassionate, and unremittingly lucid book that I’ll be returning to again and again.”
—Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize–finalist author of The Country of the Blind
“A beautiful, transformative book about being a parent in a world that rejects frailty and weakness.”
—Rachel Aviv, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
“Jessica Slice’s Unfit Parent challenges the narrative of what it means to parent in a world that wasn’t designed for everyone. Powerful, necessary, and filled with raw honesty, the story of Jessica’s lived experience as a disabled parent offers an invaluable perspective that will resonate with anyone who cares about inclusivity and accessibility. This book is a must-read for anyone who believes in a more compassionate and equitable world.”
—Alyssa Blask Campbell, CEO of Seed & Sew and author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions