Absent Parents? Parents Who Lived Apart or Died

Abstract We have so far focused on the child’s immediate everyday world as it was reshaped into single-parent and then stepfamily life. But over each of those everyday worlds there remained, whether accepted, or felt as an acute pain, or ignored, a shadow. For every one of these fifty adults who had grown up in stepfamilies shared the experience of the Joss or absence of one of their two biological parents through some, or all of their childhood. The breaking of a parental partnership whether by death, separation, or divorce inevitably leads to the partial loss of a potential parental resource, and a threat to the acquisi tion of a secure identity for the developing child. What were the factors that either mitigated or maximized the effects of such a critical loss.