[Aged parents and aging handicapped persons: a new situation, an attempt to respond]

The longevity increase which characterises the society evolution at the end of the 20th century, also concerns the handicapped people. The fact is particularly outstanding for mentally handicapped people such as the Down's Syndrome population. We are nowadays discovering the first generation of the "over 40 year-old people". Among the eldest, many of them have never left home as specialised structures were non existent when they were young. Even those, not many of them in that age group, who have been able to have access to a CAT and to profit by a specialised centre, cannot carry on working after their 35th birthday, because of their early ageing, and because of their tiredness. Therefore, they are early excluded from the CAT, they lose their advantage of being in a specialised centre and they finely have to go back home. Many parents of mentally handicapped people who live at home, even though they are not yet too old, seem to get more and more tired with their ageing advance, which, day after day, makes their unremitting action harder and harder towards their child who is also getting older. The makers relate the innovating and experimental initiative of a "Hameau Services", nowadays located at Sommières-du-Clain, a rural parish in the south of Vienne country, which offers to welcome still valid ageing parents and their mentally handicapped ageing child who lives in their own house. The collective services which are assured by the managing association, tend to relieve them in their daily material tasks in the aim of contributing to the prejudice of the unexpected arrival of the manifestations of the subordination through a proposition of a better life quality of the handicapped adult and his parents.