• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
• /
• v.45 no.2
• /
• pp.173-202
• /
• 2014

This qualitative study is designed to explore parents' experiences with their children handicapped with restricted growth. The parents' unique reality and its essential meanings are elicited through in-depth interviews enabling to reflect the insider's perspective. "From the child unable to grow to the child able to grow" is identified as the main theme penetrating through the participants'parenting experiences unique to their reality. Embracing the shock and the disappointment related to their children 'unable to grow', they thrive to make their children able to grow. However, they eventually accept their children's handicap, in spite of never doing it easily, by getting confronted with the limits of making their children grow in stature, and the social stigma and the difficulty their children experience. Therefore, they get to take alternative perspectives not focusing on their children's stature unable to grow but on psycho-social growth able to grow. Social welfare plans to support the handicapped with restricted growth and their parents are suggested.