This book provides a systematic account of parental behaviour and the means of identifying and addressing inadequate parenting. It is intended for professionals who work with children or adults who were harmed as children, and its central concern is with parents who endanger their children or whose children may endanger themselves or others. Understanding and helping troubled parents to become secure and balanced people is of crucial importance for the parents themselves, for their children and for society at large. This book is a guide to understanding parents as people who have children - as opposed to seeing them as existing solely in terms of their ability to fulfill their children's needs.This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 analyses the information processing that underlies behaviour, with the examples of dangerous and violent parental behaviour. It connects the emerging cognitive neurosciences with parenting, child protection and forensic psychology.Part 2 delineates a gradient of distortions of information processing that result from with increasing exposure to danger and that result in increasingly dangerous behaviour.It is new in providing a dimensional structure, based on information processing, to disparate examples of inadequate to extremely dangerous childrearing.Part 3 addresses prevention, treatment, and forensic decision-making. It breaks new ground in tying information processing to implications for selecting treatment strategies. A particularly important issue is addressing when particular treatments might cause harm.