Working with Stepfamilies: Clinical and Legal Contexts

Abstract It is one of the paradoxes of studying the long-term outcomes of stepfamily childhoods that by the time that they can be evaluated, there can have been such radical shifts in their typical context that it is difficult to predict from past experience into the future. What we say here about the future will therefore necessarily be less securely grounded than our interpretation of the past. Neverthe less we believe that there are indeed important messages to be learned from that past experience, both for social workers, therapists, and other professionals who work with stepfamilies, and also for the wider framework of social policy and the law. Here we sha11 discuss the more specific implications for working with stepfamiles and for the law separately. But let us begin with four general lessons which apply to both