Young children with disabilities and their families
A First Years, First Priority campaign thematic paper.
Children with disabilities have been historically under represented in data and statistics, making them invisible to policymakers.
In comparison with their peers, those children will be more likely to experience adverse socioeconomic outcomes, poor health conditions, exclusion from or poor education, poverty, and lack of employment in later life. This depends also on the existing barriers in accessing different mainstream services due to lack of appropriate infrastructure, training, reasonable accommodation, or insufficient specialised support. Despite the lack of population-level data, there is evidence that in most EU countries young children with disabilities have a greater chance of being institutionalised, segregated in special schools and face greater risks of violence and abuse, in and out of their family setting.
