In this chapter, using the UK system as an exemplar, we consider the history of attempts to improve the way families look after children. We trace the current child protection system and its twists and turns. As we have argued in the Introduction, more and more of the sorrows of life are being defined as the proper business of a child welfare system predicated on surveillance. While the state and its resources allegedly shrink, its gaze is harder and its tongue sharper. As part of an increasingly residual role, the system has become narrowly focused on an atomised child, severed from family, relationships and social circumstances: a precarious object of ‘prevention’, or rescue. As its categories and definitions have gradually grown, the gap between child protection services and family support, or ordinary help, has, somewhat paradoxically, widened. This has a number of antecedents. First, with the exception of a few decades of the 20th century, history shows a strong tendency towards individual social engineering to produce model citizens, with parenting practices the primary focus of state attention. Second, a version of evidence and expertise has flourished in which interventions become analogous to doses of a drug, with clearly delineated packages delivered over strict time scales. Third, the post-war welfare consensus has withered in the face of market enchantment and a burgeoning commissioning paradigm. Fourth and finally, the logics of managerial efficiency have flourished and, in a climate of reduced public spending, are king. These things together create intellectual apartheid (Midgley, 2013), with perfectly valid and vital understandings of life squeezed out of the policy, and increasingly the practice, sphere. We begin by summarising key moments in the early history of child protection, tracing, from these to the present day, a great leap backwards.