Kan en förälder med intellektuell funktionsnedsättning vara ’good enough’?

Sammanfattning: Parents with intellectual disabilities were recently highly stigmatized in Swedish society. In present times we have formulated human rights specially for this group of people, but still are parents with an intellectual disability a well-known target group in social work. This study aimed to investigate how different professional groups view parents with intellectual disabilities and how professionals, due to their point of view, argue in the assessment of ‘good enough parenting’. Semi-structured vignette interviews were conducted with six social workers, two of them working for social services, one of them working with the investigation of families at an institution, and finally, three of them working with family treatment at an institution. The results of this study showed that the two different categories of professionals, investigators, and therapists, mainly reasoned in the same ways in their assessment but with certain tensions. The assessments of both working categories consisted of a discussion according to signs of safety and risks in the fictitious family. The tension refers to how some parenting skills can be compromised and others may not. The group of therapists argued for the meaning of a good attachment between the child and parent, compared to the investigators arguing for the effects that not ‘good enough parenting’ in terms of structural and intellectual parenting skills can have on a child.