Should I reparent them somehow?
Doesn't seem like it, although if Qt is doing the parenting properly in the first place, you shouldn't have to loop through anything to destroy objects manually. Simply deleting the scene (if it is heap allocated) or allowing it to go out of scope (if stack allocated) should result in all items in the scene being cleanly destroyed and all views being disconnected from the scene. I have never had need to use QGraphicsProxyWidget, so I don't know what happens in that case. Probably would help to comment out your manual cleanup code and see what happens (using the debugger) when Qt goes through its normal shutdown.