Parents with learning difficulties

Mahmuda Murshed, a disabled parent, shares in her poem and article her thoughts about her work at The Elfrida Society in Islington, London, UK.

My name is Mahmuda Murshed and I have been the parenting project worker at The Elfrida Society in Islington since January this year. I found out about the job through my job coach at Mencap.

When I was offered the job I couldn't believe it. I never thought I'd get the job but I was thrilled! It is a great opportunity for me to learn about work in this field. It's a challenge as well though!

There is a great working environment at Elfrida, it feels like going from home to home. The project is a new initiative in Islington. It aims to encourage peer support amongst parents with learning difficulties and also does outreach work trying to provide information for parents about their rights when it is needed.

My main role is to organise and run coffee mornings for parents with learning difficulties. This group is aimed at parents who live with and without their children. The aims of the coffee mornings are to provide emotional and practical support for these parents through discussions, videos, talks and outings. We encourage parents to bring their children with them if they would like to. The project also aims to provide information and advice on the rights of parents with learning difficulties, when required.

In setting up the group, we first looked at the issues that might come up while talking to parents and wrote down possible solutions and advice. We also thought of several activities for the group to do. We wondered whether we would need two separate groups, one for parents living with their children and one for parents living without them, but the group decided that they all wanted to be together to support each other and share their issues!

We designed a leaflet promoting the project and sent it to all the parents that we knew of and various organisations working in this field. We also made up questionnaires for the parents to get background information and ask them their views on how they wanted the coffee mornings to develop. At present, this is still an on-going process as new people join the group.

" ... the group decided that they all wanted to be together to support each other and share their issues!"

Parents' responses to the group have been very positive. Parents say they have enjoyed the group and they are trying to extend the time we meet up. Several parents attend the coffee mornings regularly and each week there are more parents interested in joining the group. The group expressed the idea of having mixed groups, so that fathers could also join in. So far, only mothers have joined the project, but they seem to create a rather mixed group because they all come from different backgrounds and have had very different experiences. Things seem to change a lot each week and hopefully we will be getting fathers joining in soon.

At the moment, we are aiming to outline a plan for the group so that there can be a variety of weekly activities and several aims can be reached with the group. During the sessions, parents have talked about a lot of things. The main issues that have come up are about:

• bringing up children
• children being taken away
• lack of support from social services as well as from support workers
• lack of awareness around the reasons behind children's removal
• being labelled as `inadequate' parents because of lack of support.

One of the main problems that the group has also talked about is how to involve other parents in joining the group. For this purpose, we have been contacting other support groups for parents with learning difficulties in the London area in order to get some ideas for the group.

We have talked about several places where we could send leaflets and we are hoping to make a poster to promote the project together with the mothers who have been participating so far.

Mahmuda Murshed

Next: Good practice... Parents with learning difficulties: Learning curves