Explaining disability - Parents' stories of raising children with visual impairments in a sighted world

This article is a comparison of the narratives told by and about parents of children. who are blind or visually impaired. The narratives in this article come from the authors own experience raising a child who is visually impaired, from conversations the author has had with other parents of blind and visually impaired children, and,from published accounts of parents' experiences of raising visually impaired children. In addition, this article synthesizes the metanarrative told in the social scientific literature about parents of visually impaired children. This narrative comparison demonstrates that disability is located in the interplay between. individuals' physical bodies and society's constructed meanings of difference. This article posits that the lived experiences of parents who are raising visually impaired children in a sighted world do not mirror either the medical or the social models of disability, but lie somewhere in between.