Me and my partner have minor/ moderate learning disabilities. Should we have children?

[Benny91]

As I feel it wouldn’t be right to have any?

Do you know anyone with a learning disability that has children? As I find it quite rare with our disabilities to have children!

We are both 33

All those saying they have autism, autism is not a learning disability.

It’s not ableist for a disabled person to question whether it would be right to have children, or for that matter to question any other area of their life, if there’s a chance their disability may impact it.

Do you really think this is any way to address someone who has said they have a learning disability ? Successfully holding down employment is an indicator as to how successfully they would cope with family but it’s definitely not the whole story. What you perceive as a drip feed may be OP’s way of articulating and answering posters as they ask for more detail.

I teach children with severe learning difficulties and I have taught quite a few children over the years whose parents also had learning difficulties, although not as complex as their children’s.

I don’t think having learning difficulties automatically means you shouldn’t have children or that you can’t be a good parent and presumably if you and your wife both drive and hold down jobs you are able to function day to day.

The only thing to consider is whether your disabilities might be genetic and whether you would cope parenting a child who was disabled, especially if those disabilities were more complex than your own. That said, this is probably something everyone should consider before having children but I would say the fact you have a disability does somewhat increase the chances your child will too.

I have autism (although with no associated learning disability) and I have chosen not to have children because I know there is a genetic link to autism and so there is a high likelihood my child could be autistic and I don’t think I would be a good parent to an autistic child if we had conflicting sensory sensitivities or I was dysregulated etc. That’s not to say I don’t know good autistic parents (to both NT and ND children), I just know myself I wouldn’t cope. Only you can say whether you would be likely to cope with a child.

That's quite a switch up from moderate to mild tbh feels like a baiting post

I've seen people with mild to moderate learning difficulties have children the outcomes for the children were poor the adults didn't do well either loads of repeat interventions by social services lots of star charts for the parents literally laminated personal hygiene charts on the bathroom door because mum and dad didn't teach the child to wash just something they expected them to know because they knew 🙄 it didn't occur to them they were taught these things by their parents so they might need to teach their own? Immature and dramatic the best case scenario was the children being removed and sent to live with family

I've also seen people do ok raising children when they have learning difficulties but they had family support

What support do you have?

Hang on you said yourself you didn’t think you should and described your disabilities as moderate? People are reacting to that!

He didn’t say he didn’t know if it would be right, he said he felt it wouldn’t be. Nobody here knows him, so if he thinks it wouldn’t be right for him to have a child who’s going to argue with him?

Being disabled doesn’t give you more right to say whether other disabled people should or shouldn’t have kids, and therefore they are perfectly capable of being ableist themselves.

This is the sensible answer, if you are considering whether you and your partner are capable of raising a child and that is what you are asking? It comes down to your ability emotionally, physically and financially to cope. Though many people don’t consider any of these things, sadly.

If it is about the heritability of your conditions, that is more complex. And a bit controversial. The starting point would be can YOU cope with any child who might also have your/your partner’s learning difficulty.

But if the issue is whether you feel it is right to risk having a child with your LD, then becomes difficult to discuss without understanding what your LD is, whether other people in your family have it (ie is it very prevalent and there for likely) and are they/you significantly impaired by it?

Pretty much most of my entire extended family are ND. There have been challenges for my children, largely due to the way education is delivered/assessed but also in the way society has changed (and covid/lockdown). However, apart from my one child’s significant MH issues, my extended family, my other DC, myself are not impaired by it. I absolutely would not have decided that I shouldn’t have children purely because of the risk of them being ND (had I known at the time).

But the thing is, I have friends who have children with other illnesses and issues that they could never have foreseen - one where a DC had a brain tumour from which he died in his teens, and a second child diagnosed with a different cancer. None of them knew the parents’ genes would combine to produce several children with a high risk of developing a form of cancer, and I know they would not have chosen to have lived with out either of them.

So this brings us back to the starting questions: are you and partner competent to look after a child; and b) are you competent to support a child who may have your LD?

I don’t know about that, OP, and this isn’t necessarily aimed at your case but the interests of children have to come first.

Your wishes are less important than what’s in the best interests of any children you might have.

It sounds like you should have asked for stories of people having kids when the couple has mild and moderate learning difficulties.

You need to explain how the difficulties present themselves. For example do you mean that your wife might not remember if she fed your child recently or when they last had Calpol when ill? Would she forget to use a car seat or not realise that baby is in a situation where they’ll get hurt? Confusion is pretty vague and I suspect that people who say don’t do it are assuming that the confusion could mean baby being hurt. If you mean academic things like reading a story to your child or helping with homework would be impossible then that’s different. If you mean stuff like getting your child to nursery for 9am would be difficult then that’s different too.

I think that you need to talk to a medical professional and find out if your child is likely to inherit your difficulties or not.

He’s questioning that opinion though. And he’s not speaking on behalf of other disabled people, he’s talking about himself, and I think that’s coming from the worry that society is going to judge them as a disabled couple, not from any ableist concern that it’s morally wrong.

He’s accusing people of being ableist for taking his lead on his own problem.

Your description of your life situation is of a pretty typical family.

Your decision to become parents or not should be based on your personal desires about how you want you lives to look.

Which is a different matter altogether.

A few things
1- MN is ableist. Probably reflecting the general attitude in the population
2- you haven’t really explained hoe you and your DW are affected. There’s a wide range of disability under ‘learning difficulties’
3- the fact most people have children are not a reason good enough to have children. That’s Regardiess of the disability or non disability
4- being good with children in nursery says little about your ability to care for your own child. And nursery only goes up to 3yo, maybe 5yo. What will happen when that child is 10 or 15yo?
5- a lot also depends on the support you have around you!

Most importantly, you first sentence @‘I feel it wouldn’t be right to have any’ says it all. You know where you stand and what’s right for you as a coupke. Listen to that voice instead of people telling you ought to have children by now.

I’m really not convinced that two people working full time as a bus driver and nursery worker, living independently, earning £65k and posting here can possibly be described as having “moderate learning difficulties “. That term implies significant lifelong care and support is required, alongside limited communication skills. So I’m voting that this is utter rage bait.

You have posted multiple threads about this over the last couple of years. Nobody on here knows your life only you do

Your learning disabilities don't impact your activities of living. You're both earning. You both drive. You've bought a home.

You're fully functioning, independent, productive members of society. Are you planning on getting married?

Why on earth do you think you shouldn't have children?

Yes that’s more than likely but if the poster is able to recognise they experience confusion, and that he seems to struggle less with this, it’s good to be considerate of what support they might need from the get go, especially if his partner has more care taking responsibilities.

And you’re still not answering the question. Are the disabilities genetic, as in can they be passed down to children? Obviously if the answer is yes then you need to consider how fair it is to have children knowing they will likely have challenges because of their parents genetic risk factors.

I don’t agree it ableist, it’s not knowing whether either of your conditions are hereditary! My friend’s daughter and partner both have learning disabilities. Their child who is 3 has severe autism and behavioural
problems! Without support from her parents they would be struggling getting the necessary help. Both were in denial for a long time regarding their child’s disability so lost a lot of early intervention.

If you want children, have them.

I think we have moved away from using IQ for learning disabilities? personally I think SEND legislation is frustratingly at odds with other legislation or medical terminology tbh.

Are you able to care for another human ?
Do you work ?
Can you afford children?
Do you have support network?
Housing?
All things to consider
there is no should or should not

Also, I’m not sure that screenshot contradicts what I’ve said - learning disability and learning difficulty are two separate things, but a learning difficulty can be a disability if its impact meets the criteria in the Equality Act 2010.