ABSTRACT
Our intention here is to explore the contrasting ways in which adult men and women recall childhood experiences of parental loss and transitions into life with a step-parent. 1 This exploration is part of a wider project on stepfamilies in Britain, ‘Growing up in Stepfamilies’. 2 The research is based on life-story interviews with fifty men and women all born in one week in March 1958. They are a subsample of the whole cohort, who have been subsequently followed through their lives by the formal survey inquiries of the National Child Development Study. 3 Those we chose to interview were all reported to have entered stepfamilies between the ages of 8 and 16. 4
