Social research places particular importance on labels and definitions. This is especially so in the areas of disability and family life, where they reflect the assumptions that researchers make about what it is to experience disability, and what it means to be a parent, mother, father, daughter, son, and so on.

In our research, we have conformed to the terminology and definitions of disability preferred by most organisations of disabled people in the UK. For example, we prefer the terms ‘disabled people’ and ‘disabled parents’ to ‘people with disabilities’ and ‘parents with disabilities’. These latter terms, still popularly used about (and by) disabled people in North America and elsewhere, locate disability within the bodies (and minds) of disabled people themselves. They do not sit easily with our commitment to a social model of disability that sees the fundamental experience of disability as one of social organisation, access and equality of opportunity. In this book, then, the term ‘disabled parent’ is used inclusively, not just for those with physical impairments. When we do want to distinguish between the experience of parents with different impairments, we use the terms ‘physical impairments’, ‘sensory impairments’ and ‘mental health impairments’. The first two terms are commonly accepted ways of describing the impairments of disabled people; however, the latter term is less commonly used, but is chosen to reflect our commitment to include all parents within a social model perspective that differentiates between impairment and disability. In addition, we argue that alternatives serve either to locate the ‘problem’ in impairments themselves (‘mental health problems’, ‘mental health difficulties’) or define people in terms of their service use (‘mental health service user’, ‘mental health system survivor’) in a way which would not only be unacceptable for people with physical and sensory impairments, but which does not reflect the lived reality of the people in our study, many of whom had not accessed the mental health ‘system’ and can hardly therefore be said to be ‘users’ or ‘survivors’ of it. In Chapter Six, however, we use the term ‘mental distress’ in preference to ‘mental health impairments’.