Impact of having the MR Child Move Out of the Home
Another important issue concerns the mother's motivation for lifelong care giving. There is a great deal of diversity, with different women, in their reasons as to why families have decided to have their son/daughter live at home with them through adulthood.
The first reason reflects a deep-seeded sense of family responsibility for all of its members. Here, the mothers love their child and feel that they are responsible for the child, as they've given birth to them. They have never seriously considered having their son/daughter live anywhere but with the family.
The second category of reasons for lifelong care is a slightly different reason. That is, concern or distrust of the alternatives. The mothers who we categorize this way, in contrast with the first group, have actually thought about having their son/daughter live somewhere else and they have looked into it. But they were not satisfied with the quality of the services that they found when they went out looking. Many of these families hold grave reservations about the quality of life in-group homes or rehabilitation centers in which their child would live if he/she were not to be living at home.
A third category of reasons for lifelong family care is protection of the child or deferral to his/her preferences. Many older parents believe that their adult child would not be happy living anywhere else. They would need to adjust to the new circumstances. They would miss being at home or maybe even feel betrayed if the decision were to be made that their son/daughter would live elsewhere.
A fourth reason for lifelong care is that, few families have to do with mutual benefits. During the long period of co-residence, some mothers realize that there is a shared source of support and a shared dependency. They enjoy each other; they have come to rely upon each other. These mothers may have had different feelings earlier in their lives, but now in old age new reasons may emerge to continue having their son/daughter live at home with them.
The last category of reasons for lifelong care is of course, a sense of resignation that there are no alternatives. When mothers express this reason, there is no joy in their voices and they express their frustration with the lack of alternatives available to them. These mothers have never been able to put the challenge of having a son or daughter with a disability in a positive light.
These five categories of responses suggest the complexity of parental decision making regarding where their adult child should live when the parents have reached older age. Parents have their reasons; these reasons are not immutable or impervious to new decisions about where their child might live. The reason that these decisions are not impervious is because the parents are getting older. In all of the families, some decision will have to be made about how and where their son/daughter will live after the parents can no longer be the primary caregivers.
