Nurses, Parents with IDD, and Mandated Reporting of Child Maltreatment

Lauren Clark, RN, PhD, FAAN
Shapiro Family Endowed Chair in Developmental Disabilities Studies
UCLA School of Nursing

Mothers with IDD may feel afraid that child protective services will analyze how they parent and then take their children away. Their worries are justified. Without evidence of injury or other abuse, mandated reporters tend to escalate concerns about parents with IDD parents with IDD to child protective services based on their own assumptions about what makes a ‘good enough’ parent.

I’m a nurse and I teach nursing students. Nurses can have biases. They are taught that high-tech health care can ‘fix’ people. Nursing students seldom have clinical experiences with adults with IDD. They may graduate with a limited understanding of disability and reproductive justice. Those biases lead to inaccurate assessments of child maltreatment in families with a parent with IDD.

It’s time to fix lapses in IDD competence among nurses. Nursing education can include how to respect autonomy, support decision-making, and provide person- and family-centered care across the lifespan. Including nurses with disabilities in the workforce will narrow the gap between the nurses and parents with a disability. Collaborating with parents with IDD to develop and teach parent support programs will involve those most affected by oversurveillance in preventing child maltreatment. Nurses can become mandated supporters, not just mandated reporters.