UNFIT PARENT
A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World
Navigating the joys, stigma, and discrimination of disabled parenting—and how the solutions offered by disability culture can transform the way we all raise our kids
In Unfit Parent, Slice debunks the exclusionary myths that deem disabled people “unfit” to care for their children, instead showing how disabled parents and disability culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.
Combining her personal experiences with interviews, research-backed evidence, and disability studies, Slice shares insight into what the landscape is like for disabled parents—one that is scattered with unpredictable obstacles and inaccessible barriers.
Navigating the joys, stigma, and discrimination of disabled parenting—and how the solutions offered by disability culture can transform the way we all raise our kids
In Unfit Parent, Slice debunks the exclusionary myths that deem disabled people “unfit” to care for their children, instead showing how disabled parents and disability culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.
Combining her personal experiences with interviews, research-backed evidence, and disability studies, Slice shares insight into what the landscape is like for disabled parents—one that is scattered with unpredictable obstacles and inaccessible barriers. In overcoming these challenges, she describes how disabled parents are oftentimes more prepared to adapt to the demanding nature of parenthood, including the uncertainty of losing control over bodily autonomy.
Uplifting and powerful, Unfit Parent illuminates how disabled bodies and minds give us the hopeful perspectives and solutions we need for transforming a societal system that has left parents exhausted, stuck, and alone.
- Beacon Press
- Hardcover
- April 2025
- 224 Pages
- 9780807013243
Buy the Book
$28.95
About Jessica Slice
Jessica Slice is a disabled mother, author, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times’s Modern Love column, in Alice Wong’s bestselling Disability Visibility, The Washington Post, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, among others. She is co-author, with Caroline Cupp, of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled and This is How We Play: A Celebration of Disability and Adaptation. Follow her online at jessicaslice.com.
Praise
“This is such a glorious, revelatory book. Jessica Slice cuts through all the judgment and stereotypes to reveal the truth: disabled people are, in many ways, uniquely suited to and skilled at parenthood and are sources of wisdom, ingenuity, courage, and joy that the entire world can learn from. I am a nondisabled man with no children and I gained so much from this book.” —Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of An Immense World