A Study on the Right to Assistance for Families of Children with Disabilities

Abstract

The achievement of disabled children’s rights to education, recovery from diseases, and their engagement in social events not only depends on the supply of public resources, but also on the family’s ability to attend to them. In an security pattern which focuses on individual cure is inclined to neglect the extra expense, time invested and the cost of their employment burdened on the care-givers. By using the methods of normative analysis and functional comparison, this paper defines the family assistance right as a bundle of rights which focuses on the rights and interests of children with disabilities, whereby the children and their caregivers may request financial support, care services, and procedural safeguards according to related laws. This paper also analyzes the related regulations of China from three dimensions—— the accessibility to such services, the accessibility of services, and the continuity of support. And it comes to the conclusion that the major shortcomings of current security of their rights lie in the fragmentation of support measures, inadequate identification of care costs, insufficient link between cash payments and service provision, and no enough arrangements for the transition from their childhood to adulthood. When it comes to the ways of improvement, they should be based on an assessment of family needs, focus on clarifying the state's obligations, coordinate cash subsidies with care services, ensure the right to participate in relative events for children and their caregivers, and make proper plans to bridge the protection gap between their childhood and adulthood as well.