TY - UNPB N2 - Background: There is global recognition that grandparents taking on primary care of grandchildren is an increasing phenomenon. Whilst this has benefits, kinship carers also navigate myriad losses. Aims: To explore the literature as it pertains to different types of loss in three key roles and consider implications for support for these families and for society as a whole. Methods: PsycINFO and Ovid databases were used to identify 31 English language, peer reviewed papers from the past 30 years. Results: Feelings associated with grief and loss were found to be common across kinship family roles. Discussion: There are many gaps in existent research, particularly with regard to kinship children and birth parents, but also pertaining to grandfather-carers, and other minority groups. Acknowledging that grief is not necessarily defined by actual death, other losses and intergenerational trauma may be pertinent to kinship families and may need to be mourned as part of the process of adjustment. ID - discovery10205192 UR - https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205192/ PB - UCL (University College London) M1 - Doctoral A1 - Swaffield, Sheena TI - External battles and internal struggles: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of kinship grandmothers AV - public SP - 1 Y1 - 2025/02/28/ EP - 125 N1 - Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author?s request. ER -