This textbook on child maltreatment is presented as part of ‘The Protecting Children and Young People Series’. In it, the authors, the NSPCC Chair and Reader, set out to examine child maltreatment in ‘high-risk’ families, with a focus on risk factors, identification and impact. Specifically, their stated aims include to ‘identify these risks to children and families before it is too late’ (p. xii, emphasis added) and, throughout the text, there is an emphasis on early identification. Whilst the authors offer a critique of the neuroscience model, the idea that risk causes developmental and sometimes irreversible harm from an early age is central to their approach. Adolescence is mentioned as another period of risk but with much less detail. The book includes chapters on understanding effects of abuse, theorising child abuse and the value of the resilience model. This book is based on an earlier unpublished scoping report by the authors on physical abuse in high-risk families for the NSPCC (2010). These origins prove significant, as, despite the presence of ‘maltreatment’ in the title, the focus is physical abuse. For instance, in Chapter One on the ‘Toxic trio’, twelve pages are devoted to the impact of domestic abuse but only two and three to parental mental health and substance misuse, respectively. This conceptual anomaly is one of several; parenting and parental harm are presented as gender-neutral, the language to describe maltreatment and its effects is rooted in a psychological discourse and key terms are undefined. For instance, the authors adopt the term ‘maltreatment’ but predominantly examine the research on physical abuse, rather than neglect, emotional or sexual abuse, leading to an uneven focus. Maltreatment, as defined by the WHO (1999), is an umbrella term for a spectrum of abusive behaviours, not just physical abuse. Likewise, the concept of a ‘high-risk’ family is under-defined and presented without reference to the recent politicisation of family support services (Featherstone et al., 2014). ‘High-risk’ appears to mean here any family where there is more than one risk, as there is considerable emphasis on the multiplicative effects.