Unfit Parent

A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World

De: Jessica Slice

Narrado por: Finlay Stevenson

“A glorious, revelatory book.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of An Immense World

A paradigm shifting look at the landscape of disabled parenting—the joys, stigma, and discrimination—and how disability culture holds the key to transforming the way we all raise our kids

“A beautiful, transformative book about being a parent in a world that rejects frailty and weakness.”—Rachel Aviv, staff writer at the New Yorker

Jessica Slice’s disability is exactly what her child needed as a newborn. After becoming disabled a handful of years prior from a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Jessica had done the hard work of disentangling her worth from productivity and learning how to prepare for an unpredictable and fragile world. Despite evidence to the contrary, nondisabled people and systems often worry that disabled people cannot keep kids safe and cared for, labeling disabled parents “unfit,” but disabled parents and culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.

Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents. From expensive or non-existent adaptive equipment to inaccessible healthcare and schools to the terror of parenting while disabled in public and threat of child protective services, Slice uncovers how disabled parents, out of necessity, must reject the rules and unrealistic expectations that all parents face. She writes about how disabled parents are often more prepared than nondisabled parents to navigate the uncertainty of losing control over bodily autonomy. In doing so, she highlights the joy, creativity, and radical acceptance that comes with being a disabled parent.

While disabled parents have been omitted from mainstream parenting conversations, Slice argues that 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.

©2025 Jessica Slice (P)2025 Beacon Press Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A must for collections. This work offers much insight and interweaves the author’s personal experiences with interviews with numerous parents with a variety of disabilities about their experiences.”—Library Journal, Starred Review

“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

“Unfit Parent is a love letter to disabled parenting—an impeccably researched, reported, and referenced love letter—as well as an artfully drawn map of an exquisite, convivial society that can only be achieved with the creativity, skill, and joy of disabled people. Jessica Slice bends our beliefs about bodies and reorients us toward our need for one another, the messy beauty of our interconnectedness.”—Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother