Child protection intervenes in situations of inadequate parenting. Analyses of child protection routines offer insight into the ideas about the proper care and handling of children that guide interventions in this field. This article is based on interviews with social workers that were used to reconstruct 70 cases of professional interventions by systematically categorizing social workers’ reasoning and the trajectories of their interventions. Our analysis shows that approaches to parents are strongly gendered and organized around mother-focused routines. Such routines aim at a concept of private life that – in the way it is fenced in and asymmetric regarding its gender and generational order – is out of step with broader conceptions of gender and family relations. Our data show that more innovative ideas about parenting and its enhancement are absent from child protection practices.