Purge strategy for parent-child persistent objects

We are seeing performance issues in purging objects/tables that have parent-child relationships defined. Due to the number of child objects we're seeing very long duration to purge a single parent and all child tables. Is there a better way to do this and get a more performant purge task? I was thinking to purge the child tables individually first and then delete the parent is one way. Is there any other approach?

David