“UNFIT PARENT”: JESSICA SLICE REWRITES THE SCRIPT ON DISABILITY, PARENTING, AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ENOUGH
When a book challenges not just how we view parenting, but how we define a life worth living, you know it’s something special. Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World by Jessica Slice is one such book—a raw, incisive memoir that shifts the narrative on disability, motherhood, and the quietly punishing systems that decide who is deemed “fit” to raise a child.
While Slice’s memoir begins with her own story—a disabled woman navigating new motherhood—it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t just a parenting book. It’s a takedown of toxic cultural norms. It’s a spotlight on structural ableism. And most of all, it’s an invitation to reimagine what parenting could be if it weren’t bound by fear, productivity, and judgment.
PARENTING THROUGH THE LENS OF DISABILITY
As Anne Helen Petersen writes in her newsletter review of Unfit Parent, what makes this book revelatory is not just the story itself, but the way Slice makes visible the parenting norms we’ve all absorbed but rarely questioned. “It’s like picking up a big rock that’s been mostly buried in the soil,” she writes. “It sticks out! It’s visible, perceivable, in a way it wasn’t before.”
Slice doesn’t present her disability as a limitation. Instead, she frames it as a lens—one that allows her to see through the performance of “perfect parenting” that so many people engage in. Where able-bodied parents might scramble to optimize every moment of their child’s life, Slice brings attention to the simple, grounding truths of care, connection, and enough-ness.
WHAT IS “ENOUGH”?
In one of the memoir’s most poignant passages, Slice writes:
“If you look at my life through the lens of your body, [parenting] may seem unsustainable. But my capacity — for joy, for innovation, for community — is enough.”
She challenges the idea that parenting must look a certain way to be legitimate. Parenting while using a power wheelchair, parenting without designer strollers, parenting through uncertainty—all of it is still parenting. And, in her case, deeply loving parenting.
Her choices may defy the conventions of what’s safe or sufficient, but Slice’s ethos is clear: every parent is negotiating what “enough” means based on their lived experience. Her version doesn’t rely on fear or capitalism’s promise of child-proof perfection—it’s rooted in truth, vulnerability, and presence.
A QUIET RADICALISM
Slice isn’t out to romanticize struggle. Her honesty about pain, poverty, inaccessibility, and marginalization hits hard. But she doesn’t let hardship overshadow agency. Whether describing the heartbreak of being shut out of a community event because it was held upstairs, or the quiet joy of her son eating “mountain in the middle” ketchup-covered chicken nuggets in bed with her, she brings dignity to the full spectrum of disabled parenting.
In the book’s later chapters, Slice draws on her background in social work to unravel how the child welfare system disproportionately targets disabled, poor, and marginalized parents. Through a powerful analysis of mandated reporting, exposure bias, and representation gaps, she explains how systemic structures paint disability as neglect—often simply because it doesn’t fit within dominant, able-bodied expectations.
PARENTING, SLOWED DOWN
One of the memoir’s most beautiful revelations is how disability reorients time. Slice describes her “before” life as one of perfectionism and striving—traveling, achieving, optimizing every minute. Becoming disabled forced her to stop, and in that slowing, she began to live.
“Working to ease my children’s pain, while knowing I can’t, is being alive,” she writes.
It’s in these moments that Unfit Parent transcends genre. It becomes a spiritual reckoning. A meditation. A political manifesto with the soul of a bedtime story.
WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS
In her interview with Anne Helen Petersen, Slice shares the story of Dr. Paige Church—a disabled OB-GYN who describes how prenatal testing and fear-based medical narratives often lead to the erasure of disabled lives before they begin. It’s this “failure of imagination,” Slice argues, that fuels the notion of the “unfit parent.”
That failure of imagination is exactly what this book disrupts.
Unfit Parent doesn’t just offer visibility—it demands vision. It insists that we see disabled parents not as exceptions to be tolerated but as experts in endurance, creativity, and love.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Whether you’re a parent or not, disabled or able-bodied, Unfit Parent will shift your understanding of what it means to care for someone. It reminds us that parenting—like life itself—is not a checklist to be completed but a hand to hold between two words.
This book is not a plea for inclusion; it’s a declaration of worth.
Where to Buy: Feminist Press, Bookshop.org, and major retailers
Follow Jessica Slice: @jessicaslice on Instagram
Special thanks to Anne Helen for her wonderful insight: https://annehelen.substack.com/
