The paper describes a study of interrelationships between social workers’ beliefs about the important elements of parenting to ensure a child’s well-being and their perceptions about what underpins social workers’ decisionmaking about child care and protection. The study revealed eight strands of opinion; the article discusses three of them. The first factor includes the primacy of emotional well-being, the need to act in cases of sexual abuse and confidence in the current child protection system in that it is not seen to be making harsh or unfair judgments upon parents simply bcause they are unconventional. The second factor includes suport for social work intervention on behalf of children who are being abused or neglected but the intervention should be far more supportive and less hampered by resource limitations. Factor three represents a highly internally consistent account in which attachment and emotional issues are most salient and which link closely with opinions about decisionmaking. Tables, figures, references