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Developmental disabilities are a diverse group of physical and/or mental impairments that begin anytime up until 22 years of age and are usually life-long. Development disabilities limit a person's capacity to engage in major life activities such as independent living, mobility, language, learning, working, decision making, and self-care. Common diagnoses that often fall under the definition of developmental disabilities include intellectual disability, autism, cerebral palsy, hearing impairment, vision impairment, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There are currently about 4 million people in the United States with a developmental disability. This chapter primarily focuses on issues faced by older people with intellectual disabilities.

The success that the aging of persons with developmental disabilities (DD) represents also means challenges for families who must provide longer term and new forms of care. In addition, traditional views of family caregivers, particularly older parents as caregivers, must be expanded to include other relatives, such as siblings and grandparents. The aging of persons with DD and their caregivers requires all social workers to renew perspectives, tools, and approaches. The increasing complexity of life history and experiences, health needs, and life transitions also require that a holistic and multidisciplinary perspective be embraced. Drawing on the related research and practice literatures, this chapter outlines key demographic issues for adults with DD and their families, and describes changing family caregiving constellations. Suggestions are offered for the assessment and management of life transitions, and of grief and bereavement issues that are increasingly a feature of the older years of both caregivers and persons with DD.

Court cases involving children reveal the extent to which the reasonable person standard, at least in that context, turns on conceptions of what is normal behaviour and what is natural. The history of assumptions about who is ‘normal’ is itself cause for concern. The idea of the normal and the rhetoric of common sense work together to give content to and justify the operation of the reasonable person standard. By tracing out the details of this complicated relationship between the reasonable, the normal, and common sense, this chapter explains how the reasonable person and perhaps the operation of the objective standard more generally may raise serious equality concerns. The role accorded to custom in determinations of negligence is perhaps the most straightforward example of the relationship of normal or ordinary behaviour to determinations of reasonableness. The concept of ordinary prudence and developmental disability are also discussed.

This chapter examines research about the music learning processes of individuals with autism and developmental disabilities. Two central questions are explored: What should music practitioners and researchers know to optimize their understanding of the students with autism or learning disabilities? In particular, how can they show that music education can help those students to make adequate yearly progress? The chapter reviews designated categories in special education in order to place autism and developmental disabilities in context. In music class, a student with autism and developmental disabilities learns what he can do, which in turn enhances self-esteem and feelings of accomplishment.

Postsecondary programs for non-traditional students, including many specifically designed for students with intellectual disabilities (ID) and/or developmental disabilities (DD), present new questions. Many of these programs aim for some type of full inclusion, including living on campus, taking classes, generating college transcripts, and socializing with other college students. The successes of such programs have made headlines, although the question of exactly what students’ experiences mean in the wider cultural context of employability, independence, and social capital are unclear. It is also unclear that the voice of the actual participants is well-recognized in the design and assessment of such programs. This chapter will frame postsecondary education programs for ID/DD, with recognition of the importance of the “service user” voice and individual program experiences. It will consider the wider extent to which new ID/DD postsecondary identities are affecting pedagogy and research in the postsecondary educational landscape, and the ethical questions generated.

Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have the right to participate in research with dignity and respect. Information about persons with IDD is often acquired from third parties; however, they are capable of, and want to be included in, research. Nevertheless, current practices to protect persons with IDD from harm may preclude them from participating in research. Therefore, inclusive research requires ethical and practical considerations to ensure that persons with IDD are treated fairly. In this chapter, experiences and recommendations in four aspects of ethical research with persons with IDD are shared: (1) accessibility, (2) consent, (3) confidentiality, and (4) research participation risks. Interactions with research ethics boards are used to illustrate the complexity of these ethical considerations and the need for guidelines.

This chapter discusses feeding and eating problems of the child or adult with intellectual and developmental disabilities and special health care needs, including normal development of feeding, gross motor development, behavioral aspects of feeding and eating, oral-motor difficulties and swallowing problems, problems with sensory processes or the feeding process, assessment of feeding and eating problems, assessment of oral-motor problems, assessment of positioning problems, behavioral and environmental problems, factors to consider in the nutritional assessment and intervention, tube feeding, self-feeding, and follow-up care.

This chapter describes the inclusion criteria for a body of research on ways of supporting parents of children with intellectual disabilities and autism. The standards for determining whether a practice is an evidence-based practice (EBP) are presented along with the review procedures followed by the authors. The use of meta-analysis for synthesizing group studies is explained. The context for family support interventions is presented, including recent understanding of positive family adaptation and the shift away from a pathological view of families to an understanding that support programs can facilitate adaptation in improving family quality of life. Studies are positioned in a larger service system.

This chapter presents a brief account of the history of institutionalization. After World War II, institutionalization was the professional consensus about how to deal with people diagnosed with intellectual and other developmental disabilities. Physicians advised parents to provide custodial care, which was too great a burden at home and held potentially serious consequences for normal siblings. In many institutions, visits were prohibited or limited for a period following admission so as not to exacerbate the difficulties of adjustment for both families and patients. Within this context, some parent groups centered on developing larger role for families in the care of their institutionalized children. By 1960, the initial postwar efforts to broaden existing services incorporated the aim of reforming conditions in institutions.

Drawing on school-based ethnography in classrooms serving students with Asperger’s syndrome and related autism spectrum conditions in a district on the East Coast of the United States, this chapter analyzes how the meanings of these conditions are defined, negotiated, and deployed in consequential ways in contexts of everyday practice. The chapter begins by tracing schisms between “developmental disability” and “mental illness.” Through what Ian Hacking calls a “looping effect of human kinds,” students diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and related developmental disabilities come to exemplify a form of “brainhood,” a cerebral identity associated with replicable, quantified, and high-tech brain science. This schema is contrasted with local understandings of students classified with emotional or behavioral disturbance as changeable, morally culpable, and interpersonally engaged—thus exemplifying theories of mental illness as rooted in fluid brain chemistry and family dysfunction. The association of students with Asperger’s syndrome with a brain science seen as value-producing, mechanistic, and estranged from sociality wins them both a protected space and scarce material resources; however, this vision of Asperger’s students as “innocent machines” cannot effectively conceptualize the moral agency of their robustly social lives.

Anthroposophy’s contribution to environmentalism is evident not only in biodynamic agriculture and green banking but also across the spectrum of anthroposophical initiatives. One of the most holistic movements inspired by Steiner is the international network of Camphill communities, where people with and without developmental disabilities share daily life and work, often in agricultural settings. Camphill communities often function as innovative ecovillages, embracing carbon-neutral energy systems, biological wastewater treatment, and a variety of social enterprises. By linking concern with the natural world to concern for human health and well-being, they challenge the environmental movement to broaden its vision of ecology.

While John Locke’s impact on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, an eighteenth-century satire, is a well-worn topic of scholarly discussion, Gulliver as the butt of a satire concerning an important aspect of Lockean epistemology has not been considered. In the 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke distinguishes between person (an abstract thinker) and man (an individual with a human shape but little capacity for thought). Locke’s differentiation underwrites the modern concept of intellectual and developmental disabilities. Cognitive ableism is the belief in the superiority of person over man, of the thinker over the individual with less capacity for thought. Approaching Book Four of the Travels from a disability studies perspective, this chapter argues that Locke’s person/man binary broadly comes into play, that the character of Gulliver straddles the person/man divide, and that his characterization parodies Locke’s distinction. Book Four satirizes cognitive ableism through its protagonist, who exhibits an extreme form of it.

As robots leave the lab and are deployed in hospital or other healthcare settings, the community of users may become overreliant on and overtrust such technology. Thus, there is a pressing need to examine the tendency to overtrust and develop strategies to mitigate the risk to children, parents, and healthcare providers that could occur due to an overreliance on pediatric robotics. To overcome this challenge, we seek to consider the broad range of ethical issues related to the use of robots in pediatric healthcare. This chapter provides an overview of the current state of the art in pediatric robotics, describes relevant ethical issues, and examines the role that overtrust plays in these scenarios. We conclude with suggested strategies to mitigate the relevant risks and describe a framework for the future deployment of robots in the pediatric domain.

Throughout the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, churchmen disagreed about whom to exclude from taking holy communion, who should do the excluding, and how this exclusion should be imposed. The constant reclassifications of potential contaminants of church ritual fluctuated in tandem with larger socio-political processes. The ferocity of the debate in the 1650s reflects that decade’s social revolutionary chaos. Near the end of it, the label ‘idiot’ – whatever that may mean – arrives on the list, emerging from a dialectic of disputes which acknowledge the socio-political context. In that particular deployment of the label we start to see an outline of the modern psychological definition.