By MATP Staff Member Laura Hall
Several nights ago, as a newly married couple, my husband and I were lying in bed talking about our desire to have a baby. We both are confident that we are fully capable of having a child, taking care of a child and being amazing parents. Yet, as we were having this discussion the issues of lack of information about parenting with a disability and social stigma came up. Although both of us had been around babies and young children, neither one of us has much experience with the day-to-day tasks of childcare. I have been told many times that I am not capable of being a parent, or should consider adopting an older child. As a person in a wheelchair with Cerebral Palsy, I found that many of the parents with children in my world were overly cautious when it came to allowing me to hold and care for their babies. As a result, I don’t have much experience with feeding, or changing a diaper, or lifting a child because they were always carefully placed in my lap and I was watched with a careful eye. We know if we do become pregnant that we will have to educate ourselves, practice, and find assistive technology (AT) that will meet our needs as parents.
For this reason, I am so excited that the Michigan Assistive Technology Program is holding a webinar on “Assistive Technology for Parenting with a Disability” on April 27th. Preparing for the webinar has been extremely informative, but also a bit of a roller coaster ride emotionally, as so little is written on the topic, and much of what is written focuses on the challenges of parents with disabilities, the debate about whether they should be parents at all, and stories of parents who have lost custody of their children on the basis of disability. However, finding resources like Through the Looking Glass, that provides trainings and publications on the topic or the Disabled Parenting Project which highlights assistive technology for parenting, a support community and more, have given me hope and confidence. Even more encouraging are the stories we have heard from parents with disabilities, describing the ways they have used both commercially available products and their own ingenious modifications or methods to handle childcare tasks. We hope that you will register and join us for this innovative webinar that will challenge stigma and show that people with disabilities are, and can be wonderful parents.
Are you a parent with a disability? We would love to hear from you! Leave a comment below.
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By Aimee Sterk, LMSW, MATP Staff
Michigan Protection and Advocacy Services, a partner organization, is the federally designated agency in Michigan to protect people with disabilities’ right to vote. They operate the Protection and Advocacy for Voting Access program. If you or someone you know have questions or concerns about access to voting and access to AT for voting, contact them at 800-288-5923. They can also help you register to vote if you haven’t 
already done so. The Secretary of State’s Voter Information Center has information on registering to vote, sample ballots for elections, and directions to your polling place. That November general election is just around the corner and we want your voice to be heard—help us change the tide and increase our power, help us become a powerful constituency of voters whose voices are loud, proud, and heard.
common statements about the presentation by participants is, “I didn’t realize how much I was using technology to support my own cognition”.
Art, whether visual, audio, tactile, performance, or whatever, has always been about supporting new ways of experiencing meaning. Since meaning is the basic stuff of life, the context of our human experience, in much the same way that water is for fish, we need it to reach out from where we are to some place we have never been before. If independence and autonomy are partly about the expansion of what reality means to us, then art is Assistive Technology, and the experience of art, as well as its creation, should be a centerpiece in the whole idea of advocating for accommodations to build fulfilling, autonomous lives.