A Study On Family Relationships With Intellectual Disabilities:Features And Factors

Family is last "harbor" of persons with intellectual disabilities. Good family relationships can make persons with intellectual disabilities get sufficient support and care. Besides, it can enable them to get good education and make their potentials developed to greatest extent. However, at present, both family relationships of persons with intellectual disabilities and their present survival situations are not optimistic.With the development of the society and the constant improvement of legislations and regulations in our country, the disabled people are now possible to obtain some benefits and support in their everyday life, like rehabilitation, employment, education, health care and so on. Whereas persons with intellectual disabilities, as a special group of disabled people, are somehow neglected.This paper mainly studies the characteristics and causes of persons with intellectual disabilities’s family relationships in urban areas. The author takes persons with intellectual disabilities and their family members in J city as the research subjects. By using one qualitative research method, namely, the Long Interview, the author conducts in-depth interviews on the persons with intellectual disabilities and their parents, brothers and sisters,spouse respectively. On this basis, the collected data are analyzed and the main characteristics of their family relationships are gained. Furthermore, the causes of their family relationships are analyzed within the framework of Ecosystem Theory.Through the research, the author finds that family relationships of persons with intellectual disabilities mainly take on the following characteristics:indifference and ignorance, abuse and guilt, unwilling and despair, dependence and envy. These negative family relationships make persons with intellectual disabilities lose self-esteem and be confined at home. The pleasure of their lives is deprived and they become upset. Due to lack of respect from others, they get the negative self-esteem and feel they are inferior to others. Furthermore, some persons with intellectual disabilities lose the ability to live independently. The cause of the problems related to persons with intellectual disabilities is the maladjustment of the relationships between microscopic system, meso-system and macroscopic system. To be specific, in the microscopic system, the persons with intellectual disabilities have poor physical condition and great psychological stress; in the meso-system, there are great family economic pressure, insufficient energy of family, lack of professional skills and unstable support group; in the macroscopic system, besides absence of government, charity organizations need to be developed. In the end, the author summarizes the problems and factors behind and puts forward some suggestions.