‘The intention was to make my child happy’: experiences of mothers of children with intellectual disabilities in Ukraine, 1970s–2025

.The article explores the experiences of mothers raising children with intellectual disabilities in Ukraine from the 1970s to 2025. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, I trace how state policies, medical discourses, and everyday family practices have shaped motherhood, disability, and care. Specifically, this study applies grounded theory and critical disability studies to examine how women negotiated stigma, institutional exclusion, and social invisibility in different historical contexts. The analysis reveals both continuity and transformation in maternal strategies of resistance, adaptation, and advocacy. In the late Soviet period, medicalization, segregation, and institutionalization shaped families’ encounters with disability, while mothers who cared for their children at home received limited professional and community-based support. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, mothers increasingly combined caregiving with navigating services, securing rehabilitation and education, and advocating for their children’s rights. Parental organizations gradually transformed private experiences of caregiving and isolation into collective action and rights-based advocacy. Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 disrupted services and intensified existing caregiving burdens, while also revealing forms of maternal agency developed through decades of navigating inadequate support and building parental networks. By situating family experiences within broader socio-political change, this paper contributes to the growing scholarship on disability history, gender, and caregiving in Eastern Europe.