Understanding Families: 2

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Definition of 'family carer'

It is always useful to clarify who it is that we are talking about when we refer to ‘family carers’. For the purpose of the Lifetime of caring project, a family carer is defined as a person who has personal experience of caring for one or more persons with a learning disability who is a family member.

A family carer has personal contact with a family member who has a learning disability; even though that individual may have chosen to have moved away from home, or been supported in moving away from the family home, or has needed to move away from home. A family carer is a person who is not paid to have a personal, continuous relationship with a person with a learning disability. (We recognise that not all carers will necessarily be related by blood but that some people may choose to support a person with a learning disability in the way described above). Older carers are defined in the White Paper as aged 70 or older. In some projects the age is lower and can mean any family carer from the mid fifties onwards.

Exercise 2
What does 'family' mean to you?

Before we start thinking about the families of people with learning disabilities and their relationship with services, we need to think about our own attitudes to and experience of ‘the family’. What does ‘the family’ mean to you?

This exercise gives you the chance to think about how complex family life is. How different it can be for different people. How we need to guard against making assumptions about people’s experience, and recognise their experience might be different from our own!

Get three different pieces of paper.
On one sheet list all the good things about family life - use your knowledge and personal experience.
On the second sheet list all the negative or bad things about family life - again use your knowledge and your own experience.
Finally on your last piece of paper write down all the different types of
families we have in the UK today.

When you have completed your lists go and ask two or three other people to answer the same questions and compare the results with your own.

When you start to list all the different types of families in the UK today you are struck by many different types of family structures there are. This exercise should hopefully alert you to the fact that there are really positive things about family life that we all value. People that know you well and love you. People who are there to support you if
things go wrong or celebrate with you if you achieve something special. They can and do provide us with a sense of identity. On the other hand people can find their relationships within the family to be very stressful. We are most at risk of violence and abuse in our own homes at the hands of a family member. People write books about
how to survive them! Families - with both their good and bad dimensions are part of the life experience of men and women with learning disabilities. For the most part, family relationships are for life.

Now that you have spent some time thinking about how families in general it is time to think about the families of people with learning disabilities and why it is important that people in services engage with them in a more respectful way.

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