I recently found a fact sheet from the Sloan Family and Work Research Network about the impact of caring for special needs children on families work abilities. They gathered together facts from their own research and from others’ published research from reliable sources. You can click here to see the whole fact sheet. But the statistics that I’ve highlighted below make it clear that families of children with special needs need support that is above and beyond the caring support that all families need.
It often seems that the responsibility of caring for children with special needs is a small problem, that these families are far and few between. With 94% of ongoing health problems being invisible (this chronic pain, cancerm diabetes of other diseases invisible to the naked eye), it’s easy to see why this phenomena seems small and possibly even insignificant. But this could not be further from the truth.
This is why Tombolo aims to partner with other organizations, to make families’ support network stronger, more cohesive and less fragmented…. a service that has the potential to affect 1 in 5 families in the Unites States.
How many children in the U.S. have special health care needs?
- Nearly 14% of children and youth ages 0-17 in the U.S., or 10,221,439 children, have special health
- Nearly 22% of U.S. households have one or more children ages 0-17 with special health care needs
(National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs, 2005/2006).
How does raising a child with extraordinary health care needs effect employment?
- The Center for Child and Adolescent Health Care Policy estimates that in any given company in the U.S. approximately 8.6% of employees will be caring for a child under the age of 18 who has special healthcare needs (Center for Child and Adolescent Health Care Policy, n.d.).
- Nearly 24% of families with children who have special health care needs choose to cut back or stop working (National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs, 2005/2006).
- 48% of parents caring for children with serious emotional and behavioral disorders needed to quit a job at some time to care for their children with mental health disorders
- 27% of parents caring for children with serious emotional and behavioral disorders were terminated because of work disruptions related to their child care responsibilities.
- 11% of parents said they could not find employment because of exceptional care demands (Rosenzweig & Huffstutter, 2004).
