This paper analyzes both the production and spread of some teachings directed to poor families and how they fundamentally positioned women as "naturally" and culturally loving, educating and nurturing mothers, by making them almost completely responsible for the family's health prevention and care, as well as for the generation of a "better childhood". Ethnographic data were obtained in the context of a health education public policy - Better Early Childhood Development Program - as it was implemented in a specific locus - the city of Canoas - in order to understand how gender works to organize social power relations from a set of constructed meanings and symbols. Thus, while the target children of Better Early Childhood Development Program are taken as vulnerable, poor families, represented by mothers, have to assimilate teachings that are grounded on theoretical and scientific schema capable of producing a determined subject position - that of the teacher-mother.
gender; motherhood; public policies
