The Good Children is very much a novel about the opposition some families feel to ward institutions. One theme is the distrust the children have for anyone outside the family, especially institutions like the school and the welfare system, against which their mother repeatedly warns them. Liz, the third child of four, tells the story as she sees it, trying to preserve her state of mind at each stage in the children's dreadful tale.

Their mother instills the importance of family in all of the children. Abandoned at the age of four, she was confined to institutions for unwanted children or foster homes where the pets were treated better than she.

Her only security comes when she marries Warden McNair. As she asserts at the end of chapter two, when "you have family, you have everything."

The children's mother and father disappear early on...