In this book, Margaret MacDonald develops the research agenda that began with her doctoral work on institutionalisation in the Pauline churches and continued with a commentary on Colossians and Ephesians and various works on women in early Christian households. The focus here is on the household codes and the household setting of the early Christian communities, and particularly the place of children within those settings, understood against the backdrop of the latest research on family life in the Roman world. MacDonald's key concern is to ask how our understanding of the household codes changes if we place children – and the realities of children's lives – at the centre of attention. After an extended introduction (ch. i), setting out the main orientation and questions for the book, there follow three main chapters. The first (ch. ii) focuses on Colossians iii.18–iv.1, exploring in particular the connections and overlaps between slaves and children, for example in the use of slaves to nurse and tutor children and the existence of slave families (sometimes within larger households). The next chapter (ch. iii) turns to Ephesians v.21–vi.4, in particular to the nurture, education and socialisation of children in the household. The final main chapter (ch. iv) considers the Pastoral Epistles, and specifically the developing sense of the house church as a kind of ‘home school’ context, where children are trained in the faith, often by women. A conclusion summarises the main points of the preceding chapters and emphasises the importance of paying due attention to the ‘pervasive presence’ of children in early Christian families, house churches and assemblies. This is not primarily an exegetical study of the household code passages but rather one that draws on research on family life and family structures in the Roman world, viewed especially through the lens of children, in order to present a picture of the realities of family and household relationships. This means, in places, that the suggestions about the practices – educational, domestic, sexual – within the familial networks of the early Christian assemblies are inevitably somewhat speculative, given the silence of the New Testament sources. But this book helps in particular to illuminate the complex realities of familial and household relationships, and the ambivalent character of New Testament instruction. For example, it is unclear – because unmentioned – whether the authors of the household codes intended to proscribe the sexual use of slaves (including slave children) or not. MacDonald steers a nuanced course on such issues, neither apologetically defending the New Testament material nor radically criticising it, but identifying both ‘counter-cultural’ and conventional aspects of the household code material and its implications for the lives of children.