There is a norm assuming high mobility in the Western world today, which can increase the social and geographical exclusion of those who have limited possibilities to travel, such as people with disabilities. When it is a child who has the disability, travel-related constraints are likely to affect the whole family’s travel patterns. This study explores travel constraints among Swedish families with children with cerebral palsy who use wheelchairs. A time-geographical framework is employed. Interviews with parents show that these families’ everyday mobility is affected by authority, capacity and coupling constraints, and that it is often a combination of these constraints that makes travelling difficult. The families use different strategies to negotiate these constraints. In addition to strategies controlled by the families, the findings suggest that there is also a need for governmental support and a barrier-free transport system to enhance their mobility.

Finding a work-family balance can be difficult, not least if one has children. For parents with a disabled child, the extra childcare responsibilities might impinge on their working hours. This study investigates specifically whether one area of childcare – transport – can affect parents’ work situation. Using survey data, parents of non-disabled children are compared to those of disabled children (divided into two groups depending on wheelchair use). The paper investigates whether there is a connection between the parents’ experienced travel burden and employment status, and whether this differs depending on the child’s disability status as well as other individual and family characteristics such as the child’s age and the responding parent’s sex. The results suggest that there is a difference between parents with and without a disabled child regarding experienced travel burden, but that other factors, such as parents’ sex, might also be more important in explaining parents’ employment status.

Having mobility constraints in everyday life can negatively affect people’s quality of life and entail social and geographical exclusion. Previous research has shown that women and people with disabilities in general encounter more travel constraints compared to men and non-disabled people, respectively. However, little is known about constraints experienced by women who have disabled children. By using interviews with mothers of wheelchair-using children with cerebral palsy living in Sweden, this paper explores if these mothers’ daily mobilities are affected by gender-disability intersectionality. The paper uses a time-geographical framework, focusing on the competition between different projects in everyday life. The results suggest that these mothers are affected by gendered norms and travel constraints related to their children’s disabilities, which limit their options of transport modes and entail many chauffeuring responsibilities which they experience exceed ‘normal’ transport provision for (non-disabled) children, increasing both the number of trips and distance. Concerning time-geographical projects, these mothers prioritise their children’s mobilities and everyday projects before their own.