’s disability representations are influenced by cultural variables (e.g., social activities, parent education, and custom complex variables) or by cognitive constraints. At an early age, children have a disability representation characterized by a vision of the person with disability mainly as sick and whose diversity is strictly connected to health. This early disability representation of children is consistent with the individual model of disability and independent from parents’ disability explanations and representations. This finding supports that children are not completely permeable to social representations of disability because of cognitive constraints. Nevertheless, children appear educable on perspectives of disability adhering to a model of disability representation integral with social context and parent perspective. This is evident because the children tend to espouse their parents representations as they grow up.
Another cultural effect on children is observable from the stereotype decreasing in correspondence with an increasing level of knowledge about disability. Children’s cognitive maturity reduces stereotypes toward people with disability. These findings are also in line with those of the study previously carried out by the authors with the Implicit Association Test . In this study the authors found that, on an implicit level, disability is strongly associated with a negative and unpleasant dimension of existence (i.e., bad and ill) with concepts that characterize the individual model. In fact, the individual model was found, in the present research, universal in children and maybe more developmentally primitive—i.e., it is acquired very early or is innate and provides for the development of all other concepts . For all the children, people with disability are disabled because they are sick. Moreover, the individual model remains in the background for the adults too, emerging when the respondents rely on their most immediately available mental representation of disability or to an automatic cognitive process, such as when they respond to an open-ended question. In her survey of 311 parental narratives about disabled children, Avery  found that “the vocabulary spoken in the family home might serve to reinforce the inscription of the disabled child as a ‘patient’, and might promote a ‘custodial’ view of disability.” Although from a perspective of social constructionism—i.e., by bringing back to social determinants the disability explanations adopted in the parental narratives—however, Avery found the same pervasiveness of the individual model in the adult speeches.
Future research might overcome some limitations of the present study. These include, for example, increasing the sample size by also recruiting preteens (12 to 14 years olds) to better investigate the evolution of the correlation between parents’ and children’s models. This widening of the sample would permit observation about whether children’s disability models overlap more precisely with those of their parents as they grow up to confirm the trend of a certain perviousness of the disability representations to education. Finally, the present research reflects the Italian socio-cultural context, where the pressure to include disabled people in social life is a political and legal norm but not yet widespread in the social fabric, indeed. It would be interesting to see how in other socio-cultural contexts the disability models feeds people’s narratives on disability.
S1 File. Dataset.
Dataset of 152 children (n = 76) and their parents (n = 76) used in this study.
Conceived and designed the experiments: SF FM. Performed the experiments: FM. Analyzed the data: FM SF. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: FM SF. Wrote the paper: FM SF JLD.
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