Dismantling Disability Barriers

Most baby care equipment assumes parents can reach over high crib rails and lift infants while standing. For the growing number of parents with disabilities, such assumptions create daily barriers that separate them from the most basic acts of caregiving. Through the Looking Glass has spent over four decades dismantling such barriers.

Founded in 1982 and based in Berkeley, Through the Looking Glass (TLG) serves more than 350 families annually, with 90 percent being low-income people of color. Executive Director Megan Kirshbaum explains the organization’s straightforward but life-changing mission, “To provide and encourage respectful and empowering services – guided by personal disability experience and disability culture – for families that have children, parents, or grandparents with disability or medical issues.”

They bring their child development, occupational therapy, and mental health expertise into people’s homes, including supports for parents from the beginning of their relationships with their babies with disabilities, and supports for parents with disabilities and their babies. 

Since 1991, TLG has pioneered adaptive babycare services from occupational therapists for parents and caregivers with physical and vision disabilities or health conditions, developing techniques and adaptive equipment that maximize safety, accessibility, independence, reduce caregiver pain and difficulty, and enhance parent/child relationships.

Scenes play out that would be impossible without their interventions: a father with a spinal cord injury safely lifting his eight-month-old daughter from a crib whose side panel slides open horizontally instead of dropping down vertically. “We adapt them so that the side door slides open and closed and has locks that toddlers can’t undo,” Kirshbaum explains. For a person that uses a walker or “a person with poor balance while walking, we attach baby seats to walkers,” Kirshbaum notes, illustrating how their occupational therapists customize many solutions for individual families’ needs. 

The organization’s staff brings authenticity to their work – nearly 70% of the 60 staff members have disabilities, are parents of children with disabilities, or are members of families with disabilities. This personal understanding, combined with their professional expertise as psychologists, occupational therapists, and developmental specialists, creates what Kirshbaum calls “a kind of practical wisdom in our services.”

Their impact extends beyond individual families. Since its founding TLG has trained hundreds of thousands of professionals to better serve families with disabilities. 

Yet their work faces an uncertain future. Much of Through the Looking Glass’s funding comes from federal sources now threatened by budget cuts, putting programs that serve some of the Bay Area’s most vulnerable families at risk. TLG is committed to continuing to provide their vital, flexible services that are tailored to the diverse low-income families with disabilities who need them the most.