Services for Children with Disabilities and Their Families: The Impact on the Family’s Life Quality

Abstract

Families that have children with disabilities are faced with numerous difficulties in Serbia mostly due to the prolonged effect of social and economic crises. Besides insufficient adequate and diverse community-based services, they often experience social isolation and poverty, too. During the last decades, there were efforts to improve support for parents by introducing community-based services for their children with disabilities. This chapter is based on the findings of the study that explored the effect of those services on the families’ quality of life. Although the findings confirmed that the services generally improved their life quality, particularly for those who perceived the lowest quality of life before, there are some additional observations about “side effects” that should be useful guidelines for developing flexible individually tailored service that support families’ needs and suit them best. The study confirmed benefits of community-based services to the family life quality, exploring some specific aspects and range of change, as well as the influ-ence of level of child disability and previous perception of life quality to the extent of change. Unfortunately, there are still a large number of socially excluded families who live in poor communities that had no chance to use the services and experience an improvement in their quality of life. Social workers still have difficulties in pro-viding sustainable services, which need to be overcome in the future. Meanwhile, the results of this study might be useful for planning further steps in developing and evaluating community services for children with disabilities and their parents who should receive flexible and individually tailored service that suits their specific needs best.