Parenting is a dance led by the children." What people in the developmental disability field often forget is that for reasons beyond their control many children with disabilities don't dance very easily! We are a group of Canadian health services and social scientists, funded jointly by CIHR and the Bloorview Research Institute, exploring these issues in several ways:

• by extensive literature syntheses;
• by a review of legal and policy frameworks that affect families of disabled children;
• by analyzing population health data to explore parenting issues at a community level; and
• through a mixed-methods study with families in four Canadian cities.