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Articles by Jessica Slice
8 Inclusive Stories For Kids
We all have wonderfully unique brains! Children’s books increasingly celebrate characters with a range of ability and neurodiversity. Seeing yourself reflected in a book is precious — and something that neurodiverse children deserve.
Who Shows Up—and Who Vanishes—When Your Kid Is in Trouble?
The first time my friend Leucas visited us, it was a cold and dark January in Canada, but we made the most of it. Leucas learned the art of layering pants to defeat the chill; they taught my eight-year-old daughter, Rose, to ice skate; and we ate butter tarts near the water. Nine months later, Leucas came back—but this visit was different. They flew from L.A. to Toronto with only a few hours’ notice, and during our long days together, we hardly spoke.
When a Sore Throat Attacks the Brain
Photo: Vanessa Heins for New York Magazine One Friday morning in September 2025, my 8-year-old daughter, Rose, woke up with a sore throat. Since her toddler years, we have asked her to hold her hands apart to show us how bad something hurts. That day, she separated her palms four inches: medium. I held the thermometer to her forehead (99 degrees) and then got her cozy on the sofa with The Nightmare Before Christmas and a box of tissues.
"Disabled parenting is a rejection of intensive and consumeristic contemporary parenting."
If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here! If you want to get in touch, email here! Read more from our Ten Questions series. Jessica Sliceis a disabled author, speaker, and essayist. Her book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World has been shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. She is the co-author of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down, This is How We Play, and This is How We Talk.
Pride in Our Differences: 7 Disability Pride Reads
July is Disability Pride Month! Celebrate by checking out these books that explore disability from the perspective of young people from your local library. Tyler has trouble with words. Long words, short words, silly words — they all keep getting stuck! When he has to speak in front of his classmates, can he use his art and his voice to show everyone who he is on the inside?
11 Cozy Holiday Reads
Community means being a part of something larger than yourself, whether that be your family, friends, neighbors or favorite library workers. This holiday and winter season, let’s celebrate our community for all they have done to make us who we are today. (Cover via publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers) “Latke’s First Hanukkah” by Alan Sillberg On the first night of Hanukkah, the latke lights the menorah. On the second night of Hanukkah, the gelt gets sweet and giddy.
My Wheelchair House
It’s post-nap. My 18-month-old son opens his dresser, takes out one shirt at a time, and places them around the room: a yellow shirt in the corner, the denim oxford on my knee, and a ringer tee on his head. Drawer emptied, I ask him to climb onto my lap, and he plants one dumpling foot on my wheelchair’s frame, then stretches his other up to the cushion behind my shins. He flops his belly on my legs, and I drag him into a sitting position.
我本不想要孩子--直到我成了残疾人 - WSJ
在我20多岁的时候，每次和别人谈到孩子时，我都会说我一个也不想要。 那时我的朋友们都成群结伴而且有工作，过着既有钱又有闲的生活。因为没有孩子，我们可以随心所欲、花样百出地度过微醺的周末：参加法国主题的读书俱乐部，享用一顿自己亲手做的五道菜晚餐；在当地啤酒厂玩投掷沙包的游戏，享受慵懒的下午时光。 Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Homes Still Aren’t Designed for a Body Like Mine Original
Seven years ago, while sitting in my eighth-floor apartment with my toddler, I heard a voice over the intercom: Our building had a gas leak, and we needed to evacuate. A few weeks prior, a coffee shop down the street had exploded from a gas leak, killing two people and injuring at least 25. Terror struck me: Our elevators were powered down—and I use a wheelchair. I was trapped, unable to take myself and my child to safety. The fire department quickly determined that it was a false alarm.
Disabled and Mom Enough
For the past year, my husband David has been on parental leave with our second baby. We live in Canada, and he took the full 61 weeks available to him. When our first child was born in 2017, David returned to work the next day (we were foster parents). Over the past year, I’ve had three books come out, so David has been the primary caregiver for both of our kids. This division of household labor has reinforced a longstanding insecurity I have as a disabled mother: that I’m not seen as a real parent.
I Didn’t Want Kids—Until I Became Disabled - tovima.com
The pursuit of perfection can drive parents crazy, but health problems remind us just how little is within our control. In my 20s, when kids came up in conversation, I’d say I didn’t want any. At the time my friends were all partnered and employed, with time and money to spend. Our creative, tipsy weekends were filled with the whims of the child-free: a France-themed book club with a five-course dinner we cooked ourselves; lazy afternoons playing cornhole at the local brewery.
New book 'Unfit Parent' shares what parents with disabilities can teach the rest of society
Author Jessica Slice became disabled in her late twenties. Later, she and her husband chose to foster and adopt a child. Through her own experiences and those of others, Slice learned that despite often negative societal views, those who were disabled could often parent very well. She shares her insights in the new book “Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World” and joins host Deepa Fernandes to talk about the book.
Every Parent Is (Kind of) Disabled
Jessica is also the co-author of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled, and This Is How We Play: A Celebration of Disability and Adaptation, as well as the forthcoming This Is How We Talk and We Belong. She has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Alice Wong’s bestselling Disability Visibility and more. Jessica and I recorded this conversation before RFK Jr made his latest horrifically ableist speech about autism.
I Didn’t Want Kids-Until I Became Disabled
The pursuit of perfection can drive parents crazy, but health problems remind us just how little is within our control. In my 20s, when kids came up in conversation, I’d say I didn’t want any. At the time my friends were all partnered and employed, with time and money to spend. Our creative, tipsy weekends were filled with the whims of the child-free: a France-themed book club with a five-course dinner we cooked ourselves; lazy afternoons playing cornhole at the local brewery.
You Might Be Afraid for Someone Like Me to Parent a Newborn. I Was More Ready Than You Know.
Skip to the content Expressing Grievances Through Humor Family Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Most of K’s newborn clothes arrived inside a white trash bag left outside our two-bedroom Oakland house. We bought her bite-marked crib on Craigslist. I meant to take monthly photos to show her growth, but when I look back, there is only one, from 3 months.
I Loved Parenting a Newborn. I Had a Secret Weapon.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Most of K’s newborn clothes arrived inside a white trash bag left outside our two-bedroom Oakland house. We bought her bite-marked crib on Craigslist. I meant to take monthly photos to show her growth, but when I look back, there is only one, from 3 months. I’ve scribbled “3” in ballpoint pen on a piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook. It looks like a ransom note.
How the Child Welfare System Prioritizes Autonomous Family Units, and Punishes Disabled Parents
A faded sign outside boasted great rates and free local calls. The motel windows did nothing to block the West Oakland road noise. Sitting on the stained quilt, Natalie and her fifteen-year-old daughter Tara knew that they needed help. Natalie was starting to make less sense, and she had expressed a passing desire to hurt herself.
The Ingenuity Of Disability Culture Could Benefit All Parents
Before I became a parent, I watched friends, newborns in their arms, skip-walk around the room until their babies fell asleep. Others sat on exercise balls, rocking and bouncing to ease out one last burp. I can stand for about 30 seconds before my vision starts tunneling. I can sit upright, unsupported, for three to five minutes. “What will I do when my baby cries?” I wondered.
What Disability Taught Me About Parenting
I had been disabled for six years when I became a foster mom. In order to get a foster license, my doctor needed to attest to my capacity to parent. I agonized about asking him. The degree to which I present as disabled varies. If I’m not using my wheelchair, and if I’m sitting somewhere with adequate supportive cushioning, I can appear well.
Being Disabled Made Me a Better Parent Original
When my daughter was a few months old, I joined a group for new moms. We brought our babies and talked for a couple of hours each Wednesday in a community center in Oakland, California. I was an unusual parent within that group. Unlike the other moms, I hadn’t given birth. At the time, I was fostering my daughter, though my husband and I have now adopted her.
10 New Books to Read in April at the Arlington Public Library
Spring is here! The cherry blossoms have peaked, baseball is underway and whether you’re going to the beach or your couch, it’s time to stockpile a few books for spring break. T.S. Elliot opened The Wasteland by declaring April to be the cruelest month, but with this many great books coming out, we have to disagree! Fiction Murder by Cheesecake by Rachel Ekstrom Courage Picture it: Miami, 1980s. Four beloved sitcom characters have to solve a murder to free one of their own.
Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World
. Apr. 2025. 224p. ISBN 9780807013243. $28.95. CHILD REARING COPY ISBN Slice (coauthor, Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled) shares, with no holds barred, her experiences as a parent living with a disability. After a hike with her husband triggered a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Slice was diagnosed with a genetic condition that affects connective tissues, joints, blood vessel walls, and more. It also can cause neurological complications.
I Spend 20 Hours A Day In Bed & It’s My Kids’ Favorite Spot In The House
If there is one parenting trope that I think about a lot, it’s the bed mom. The bed mom has given up. Or she will give up soon. Her children sit outside her door, hoping that it cracks open, desperate for just one moment of their mother’s love. She’s usually depressed, or addicted, or dying of cancer. She has a migraine. The room is stale, or, as with Edie Beale from Grey Gardens, overrun with ephemera, a hot dog maker and a record player.
Darkly
Marisha Pessl. Delacorte, $19.99 (416p) ISBN 978-0-5937-0655-8 Though 17-year-old Dia enjoys working at her family’s antiques shop, she worries that her life is going nowhere and yearns for more. Then she sees an ad from the Louisiana Veda Foundation, founded in honor of the 39-years-dead eccentric genius of the same name, creator of the complicated board games—now collector’s items—known as a Darkly.
My So-Called Family
Gia Gordon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-39205-5 Twelve-year-old Ash doesn’t need her foster family to love her. What she needs is a family that will respect and care for her. But her experiences as a foster child have taught her that adults are untrustworthy.
What the Woods Took
What the Woods Took Two strangers wrest 17-year-old Devin Green from her bed in Portland, Ore., while her foster parents stand aside.
Black Girl Power
Edited by Leah Johnson. Freedom Fire, $18.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-368-09898-4 This empowering collection of 15 stories about girlhood, written by authors of the Black diaspora—including Sharon Flake, Kekla Magoon, and Ibi Zoboi—and edited by Johnson (Ellie Engle Saves Herself), who also contributes, contains messages of hope, resilience, power, and friendship.
Mishka
Anoush Elman and Edward van de Vendel, trans. from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier, illus. by Annet Schaap. Levine Querido, $15.99 (160p) ISBN 978-1-64614-458-7 This tender novel, narrated in a simple, affecting voice by nine-year-old Roya, gently illuminates the disorienting effects of the refugee experience on a child. Smuggled out of Afghanistan with her parents and three older brothers when she was three, Roya and her family subsequently lived in a refugee center for five years.
Se preocupaba por mí, así que rompí con él
Modern Love Ante la posibilidad de una relación sana, mi cuerpo y mi mente entraron en pánico. 28 de noviembre de 2021 a las 05:00 ET David dijo que sabía que yo estaba interesada en él por mi lenguaje corporal. Me había girado hacia él en el pequeño banco de madera, metiendo los pies debajo y apoyando el brazo en el respaldo. Él llevaba una mochila y me habló de Studs Turkel y me preguntó si quería que me prestara Slouching Towards Bethlehem de Joan Didion.
Modern Love: Él sí se preocupaba por mí, y por eso terminé la relación
David dijo que sabía que yo estaba interesada en él por mi lenguaje corporal. Me había girado hacia él en el pequeño banco de madera, metiendo los pies debajo y apoyando el brazo en el respaldo. Él llevaba una mochila y me habló de Studs Turkel y me preguntó si quería que me prestara “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” de Joan Didion. Sin embargo, había interpretado mal mi lenguaje corporal. No intentaba demostrar que estaba interesada.
He Cared About Me, So I Broke Up With Him (Published 2021)
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading. David said that he knew I was interested because of my body language. I had turned to face him on the small wooden bench, tucking my feet under me and resting my arm on the backrest. He was carrying a backpack and talked about Studs Terkel and asked if I wanted to borrow Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” He had misread my body language, however. I wasn’t trying to show I was interested.
Moving to Canada to Save Black Son from Racism, Police Brutality in America
Every parent mourns the loss of innocence for their kid at some point—the first pet that dies or friend who moves away—but as parents of a Black child, my husband and I know that one day, we’ll have to have The Talk. The one we’ve already started with our 3-year-old son Khalil but have yet to finish. The one in which we have to tell him that because he is Black, he is more likely to be harmed by the police, convicted of a crime, and underpaid for his work.
A Black Mom and a White Mom Discuss Raising Their Black Children in the South
To be a mother is to live in a state of heightened emotions: more joy each time you see your child smile, more excitement than you ever thought you could feel watching someone tie their shoes. There’s also more fear. Fear that the part of you that goes off into the world every day could meet harm.
A Black Mom and a White Mom Discuss Raising Their Black Children in the South
To be a mother is to live in a state of heightened emotions: more joy each time you see your child smile, more excitement than you ever thought you could feel watching someone tie their shoes. There’s also more fear. Fear that the part of you that goes off into the world every day could meet harm.
My Power Wheelchair Makes Me a Better Mom (Published 2020)
Because I can walk short distances, strangers judge me for using a wheelchair. But it allows me to be the parent my active toddler needs. Credit...via Jessica Slice April 17, 2020 This story was originally published on Nov. 18, 2019 in NYT Parenting.
Perspective | My disability doesn’t shorten my life expectancy. Medical rationing might.
On our 21st day of total isolation, my husband, David, and I curled up in bed, sleepily discussing how our toddler was coping with having only us as playmates. (Mostly okay, albeit with some new phobias: certain pillows, falling vases and our sleepy geriatric dog’s “sharp claws.”) Mid-conversation, I made the ill-advised decision to check the news on my phone. Within seconds, we were wide-awake, sitting up, computers out, plotting how to make me appear as not-disabled as possible.
Our Federal Government Has Failed To Protect Us, And We Have Every Right To Feel Traumatized
(Photo: Agapitova Natalia via Getty Images) Our 3-year-old son, Khalil, is exactly as reasonable as he should be, which is not at all. He is scared of things that aren’t all that risky ― like the sound of the washing machine ― and completely unfazed by things that could actually harm him ― like jumping enthusiastically under a countertop. It’s not his responsibility to worry about everything.
What Are You Doing Right Now? I’m in Chronic Pain
My chronic pain never stops being interesting to me. If someone were to ask about my health, I could provide them hundreds of updates about today alone. The way my brain felt like it was bouncing in my skull when I walked down the hall to put my dishes away. The way looking down at this computer pulls painfully on my middle back. The way I felt the shower walls sway this morning and crouched on the floor so that I was even lower to the ground than my shower stool, in case I fainted.
My Power Wheelchair Makes Me a Better Mom
Personal Stories Because I can walk short distances, strangers judge me for using a wheelchair. But it allows me to be the parent my active toddler needs. Image Most mornings, my 2-year-old makes a request to “ride Mama dinosaurs.” What he’s really asking is if he can sit with me in my wheelchair on a visit to our local science museum, which has a paved trail through dense woods with incredible life-size dinosaur replicas.
Adelanto: The Model for Orange is the New Black's Final Season Has a Long History of Mistreatment Allegations
By Jessica Slice Adelanto Detention Center, originally constructed as a private prison but expanded and converted to an ICE processing center in 2010, has drawn attention for its inhumane conditions and controversial oversight since its inception nearly a decade ago. The final, impactful season of Orange Is the New Black took place largely in ICE detention and gave viewers the opportunities to learn the stories behind the statistics around the detention of immigrants.
Parenting with a disability makes me feel like an 'impostor' as a mother
I didn’t know that I was about to become a mother: We found out that our son, Khalil, existed 12 hours before I brought him home from the hospital. Sometimes I still don’t feel like one. When people talk about parenting — the long nights pacing with a crying baby, the carpool slog, potty training — I can chime in, but a part of me feels like an impostor. That’s because I have a disability.
Parenting with a disability makes me feel like an 'impostor' as a mother | All4Women
When people talk about parenting – the long nights pacing with a crying baby, the carpool slog, potty training – I can chime in, but a part of me feels like an impostor I didn’t know that I was about to become a mother: We found out that our son, Khalil, existed 12 hours before I brought him home from the hospital. Sometimes I still don’t feel like one.
Perspective | Parenting with a disability makes me feel like an ‘impostor’ as a mother
While my son acts out every emotion with his body, my physical range is limited. Jessica Slice; her husband, David Yourdon; and their son, Khalil Slice, at a courthouse in Oakland in December for Khalil’s adoption day, just before his second birthday. (Photo by Anne-Claire Brun) Jessica is an master of social work candidate at Columbia University, where she advocates for accessibility in higher education. She at work on a memoir.
Parenting with a disability makes me feel like an 'impostor' as a mother
Jessica Slice, The Washington Post Published 10:45 am CDT, Wednesday, September 4, 2019 I didn't know that I was about to become a mother: We found out that our son, Khalil, existed 12 hours before I brought him home from the hospital. Sometimes I still don't feel like one. When people talk about parenting - the long nights pacing with a crying baby, the carpool slog, potty training - I can chime in, but a part of me feels like an impostor. That's because I have a disability.
I Love 'Queer Eye.' I Don't Love The Way It Portrayed People With Disabilities.
One of the things that I love most about “Queer Eye” is the way the show artfully deconstructs stereotypes by cutting through loaded and polarizing issues to tell the stories of individual people. Jonathan, Antoni, Karamo, Bobby and Tan introduce their audience to individuals and their communities with sensitivity and respect. We have never needed the Fab Five more, and personally, I adore them. It’s my loyal fandom that made Episode 2 of the newly released Season 4 particularly disappointing.
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