For instance:

class MyObject: public QWidget 
{
  Q_OBJECT

...
Q_SIGNALS:
    void newText(const QString& text);

public Q_SLOTS:
    void handleText(const QString&);

...
};

MyObject::MyObject(QWidget* parent): QWidget(parent)
{
...
    QLineEdit *le = new QLineEdit(this);
    connect (le, &QLineEdit::textChanged, this, &MyObject::handleText);
    connect (this, &MyObject::newText, le, &QLineEdit::setText);
...
}

@JKSH says he keeps pointers around, which is my inclination too

Honestly I keep pointers only to objects that I need to manage directly after creation (for example I don't keep pointers to QLabel if I don't need to change their text; the same for layouts and so on..)

@Tabj said:

void addElementsToForm()
{
QFormLayout *thisForm =new QFormLayout(mainLayout);
thisForm->addRow(new QLineEdit(_tr("status"));
}

I would think both the 'thisForm' and the instance of QLineEdit would go out of scope

Both the QFormLayout and the QLineEdit are created using new, so they are put in the heap, not the stack.

Also, if you create a new QLineEdit here that you need to access later (out of this procedure), how do you get access to that? Do you crawl the children looking for the name you gave the label ("status") or do a find child? My inclination is to save that instance in a class object so I can get at it, but it seems a lot of examples don't bother with that.

Yes, you can save a copy of the pointer. The examples didn't bother, probably because they didn't need access to the pointer afterwards.

Crawling the child list works too, but it's probably a bit slower.

Like you, I'm inclined to save the pointer.

little fix: QFormLayout::addRow() requires 2 parameters.

BTW, Qt manages children in a very user-friendly way.
Each time you create an QObject instance (or a subclass) you can specify the parent; each QObject has a list of his children (pointers) and handle the destruction of these automatically.
For that reason is really suggested to create objects in the heap assigning their a paren

void MyWidget::foo() {
    QWidget *w = new QWidget(this);
    QLabel* l = new QLabel(tr("Hello"), this);
}

in that case w and l are children of this. this stores a pointers to w and l and when is destroyed it takes care of destroying all his children