"I am the mother of the kind of child you dread having": Experiences of living with chronic sorrow among parents with a disabled child.

Chronic sorrow involves parents' enduring grief due to their child's disability. This stems not only from the recurring painful reality parents face, which differs from the life they had hoped for their children, families, and themselves but from also being confronted with societal and personal norms and expectations they cannot meet. There is a lack of research on the lived experiences of parents' chronic sorrow.

'It is up to me because I gave him this life' How the awareness of being permanently and unconditionally responsible shapes the experience of chronic sorrow in parents of disabled children.

Objective: The majority of parents with a disabled child experience chronic sorrow, characterized by recurrent feelings of grief and loss related to their child's disability. There is a significant lack of research on parents' lived experiences of chronic sorrow, which limits our ability to understand parents' needs and provide proper support.

Design: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was conducted based on in-depth interviews with six parents of severely disabled children.