Stephanie Woodward: Expanding the Picture of Disabled Adulthood
Some advocates change minds through policy. Some through research.
Stephanie Woodward changes minds through storytelling and humour—because it is hard to keep believing an assumption once you have laughed at how absurd it is. Stephanie is a disability rights attorney, the CEO of Disability EmpowHer Network, a wheelchair user, and a mother.¹
One of the things I love most about Stephanie’s content is that one minute you are laughing, and the next you are rethinking an assumption you did not even realize you were holding.
Her work is often discussed in relation to disabled parenting. But I do not think it is only about parenting. It is about something much bigger. It is about expanding the picture of disabled adulthood.
The Assumptions We Don’t Realize We’re Carrying
What makes a good parent? Is it the ability to walk? Reach the top shelf? Carry every grocery bag in one trip?
If that last one is the standard, I regret to inform you that many non-disabled parents are also in trouble. Most of us would probably say that good parenting is about loving, nurturing, protecting, guiding, and showing up for a child. Yet when the parent is disabled, those standards can quietly change.
People begin asking different questions. How will they carry the baby? How will they complete certain physical tasks? Who will help them? What happens in an emergency? These questions may sound practical. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they reveal something deeper: we may be evaluating disabled parents according to how closely their parenting resembles non-disabled parenting rather than according to whether their children are loved, safe, and cared for.
Stephanie’s content makes those assumptions visible. She shares the adaptive equipment her family uses, the ways she and her husband complete parenting tasks, and the ordinary chaos of raising children. She also responds to people who treat their disability as evidence that they should not be parents at all.
Rather than defensively proving that she can parent, Stephanie often reveals the absurdity of the standard itself. Her family may appear fascinating from the outside, she has explained, but from within it feels “rather mundane.” They are not trying to be revolutionary. “We’re just parents.”² That ordinariness matters.
Disabled adulthood is so often presented as exceptional that simply showing an ordinary family life can become a form of advocacy.
Where Do Those Assumptions Come From?
Psychologist Rhoda Olkin points to a significant gap in research on disabled adulthood. While considerable attention has been given to disabled children, research involving adults has more often focused on rehabilitation, employment, and adjustment than on family life, parenting, and other ordinary aspects of adulthood. As a result, the research literature has often presented a much narrower picture of disabled adulthood than the lives disabled people actually lead.³
When disabled parenting has been studied, the research has often begun with a search for harm. Olkin describes literature focused on the presumed negative effects of a disabled adult’s disability on a child’s development. She notes that disabled parents and their children have frequently been examined through pathologizing assumptions, with children positioned as potential “victims” and disabled parents’ choices—and even their right to have children—placed under suspicion.⁴
That starting point matters.
When research begins by asking: How might this parent’s disability harm the child? It has already decided what kind of story it expects to find. It may overlook a different set of questions: How has this family adapted? What supports make parenting possible? Which parenting functions are genuinely essential? Are we evaluating how well someone parents—or how closely their parenting matches what we have come to expect?
Stories shape expectations. And expectations shape assumptions. When stories of disabled adulthood are missing, assumptions rush in to fill the silence.
Stephanie’s work quietly pushes back against that silence. She does not only tell people that disabled adults can become parents. She allows people to see disabled adulthood being lived.
Why Representation Matters
Stephanie has shared messages from disabled people who were afraid to have children until seeing her family helped them imagine that parenthood was possible for someone like them.⁵ She has also described hearing from someone who feared that a child would not want them as a parent. After watching Stephanie speak about her foster sons choosing her and her husband as their parents, that person recognized both the fear they had been carrying and the possibility that it was not true.⁶
They had not necessarily been told they could not become parents. They had simply never seen disabled parenthood represented as an ordinary, possible future. Sometimes what looks like self-doubt is not really about confidence. It is about representation. It is difficult to picture yourself in a future you have rarely—or never—seen someone like you inhabit.
Representation does not just help people feel seen. It expands the futures they can imagine for themselves. This is why Stephanie’s contribution reaches beyond parenting. Her work gives disabled people access to a broader picture of adulthood: partnership, family, careers, community, leadership, messy homes, adaptation, humour, ordinary problems, and ordinary joy.
She is not offering an inspirational story about overcoming disability. She is making disabled adulthood visible in all its complexity.
What This Means in Therapy
Most therapy asks: what beliefs do you have about yourself?
Disability-Affirmative Therapy also asks: where did those beliefs come from? That distinction matters.
A disabled person may enter therapy believing: I would not be a good parent. A child would not want me. I would be too dependent. My family would suffer because of me. I should not need this much help. A conventional approach might immediately focus on whether those beliefs are rational or distorted.
But beliefs do not develop in isolation. They can grow from years of inaccessible systems, limited representation, unsolicited opinions, medical warnings, cultural stereotypes, and repeated messages about what disabled people supposedly cannot or should not do.
Stephanie describes how people can begin to believe the limitations that others place on them. She has also warned that renewed stereotypes can lead disabled people to internalize ableism and restrict their own lives according to what society says they are capable of.⁷
That is why my first question is not always: how can we change this belief?
Sometimes it is: who taught you this was true? That question creates room to separate a person’s authentic desires and concerns from assumptions they may have inherited.
Perhaps someone genuinely does not want children. Perhaps someone wants parenthood but needs practical information, adaptive equipment, financial support, community, or help navigating an inaccessible system. Perhaps someone is not lacking confidence. Perhaps they have simply never been shown that this future belongs to them too.
Disability-Affirmative Therapy does not tell disabled people which future they should choose. It helps them examine whether the future they have ruled out was ever truly unavailable—or whether someone else’s expectations made it feel that way.
Why Stephanie’s Work Matters
Stephanie’s content is funny because the assumptions she encounters are often absurd. But the consequences of those assumptions are not. They influence how disabled adults are treated by healthcare providers, social services, researchers, strangers, family members, and sometimes therapists.
They can shape whether disabled people are trusted. Whether they are supported. Whether they are seen as adults. Whether they believe certain futures are available to them.
Olkin argues that disability has too often been framed as a disruption of normal development rather than as a parallel or alternate—and still perfectly normal—life progression. She cautions against evaluating families from a “normal-centric” point of reference and argues that ideas such as “good enough” parenting must be flexible enough to include disabled parents.⁸
Stephanie’s life and work give that argument a visible form. She shows us that disabled adulthood does not have to imitate non-disabled adulthood to be full, ordinary, loving, complicated, or complete. So perhaps we should return to the question: What makes a good parent? Walking? Reaching the top shelf? Carrying every grocery bag at once? Or loving, nurturing, guiding, adapting, and showing up?
Perhaps Stephanie’s greatest contribution is not changing what we think about disabled parents. It is expanding the picture of disabled adulthood. In doing so, she reminds us that many of our assumptions are not inevitable. They are shaped as much by the stories we have been missing as by the ones we have been told.
If you're looking for disability-affirmative therapy in BC, I provide virtual counselling for teens and adults with physical disabilities, chronic illness, medical trauma, and advocacy fatigue. Learn more about Disability-Affirmative Therapy
Footnotes
Veronica Volk, interview with Stephanie Woodward, Connections, WXXI Public Radio, YouTube video, 0:33–2:16 and 21:16–23:58.
Volk, interview with Woodward, 9:15–9:57. Woodward describes her family as “rather mundane,” rejects being viewed as either inspirational or incapable, and concludes, “We’re just parents.”
Rhoda Olkin, What Psychotherapists Should Know About Disability (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 125.
Olkin, What Psychotherapists Should Know About Disability, 126–27.
Volk, interview with Woodward, 12:18–12:45.
Volk, interview with Woodward, 12:50–13:45.
Volk, interview with Woodward, 32:57–34:17 and 37:54–40:41.
Olkin, What Psychotherapists Should Know About Disability, 134–35.
Bibliography
Olkin, Rhoda. What Psychotherapists Should Know About Disability. New York: Guilford Press, 2001.
Volk, Veronica. Interview with Stephanie Woodward. Connections. WXXI Public Radio. YouTube video, 51:40.
