The greatest thing about this film is that every character in this film has good and bad qualities. Even the convicted sex offender managed to evoke a little bit of sypathy from me.
More interesting to me, however, were the two lead characters played by Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. Although they were the romantic leads in the film, we were by no means meant to view them as guiltless lovers escaping bad marriages. In a somewhat surprising twist, both their spouses actually seemed to be halfway decent people. At least, they didn't ultimately seem any worse than the lead characters. The bad marriages weren't the result of a terrible spouse, but just the result of an unfortunately pairing of incompatible people.
This type of moral ambiguity made the film really interesting to watch and think about later on. Without any easy answers, or easy judgements, Little Children is a far more interesting film than other films which cover the same subject matter.