ABSTRACT
Recent research has highlighted what clinicians have long known: that relationships with brothers and sisters in the context of stressful life events can act as mitigating and protective factors for children, or can exacerbate what is already painful in family life. Children of different ages respond in different ways and are able to clarify issues and help one another. Family interviews can be particularly useful between the children and the parent with whom they live on a daily basis when transitional events are taking place that affect the lives of all family members. Such an event would be when a parent takes a new partner. Children will be adapting not only to their own changes in the pattern of relationships, but also to the changes in pattern of their parents' lives and loyalties. Children who live in step-families are likely to have experienced more than one change of pattern in their key relationships.
