This essay explores the ideological and institutional models for child welfare created and promoted by Dr. Arthur Moncorvo Filho in early twentieth-century Brazil. Moncorvo Filho explicitly connected children and child welfare with the nation and promoted the idea that the national government should centralize control over existing child welfare institutions. In so doing, he asserted that the government should assume the role of parent to the nations poor children to protect them from the poverty and delinquency then prevalent in Brazil's cities. In his model, children had intrinsic value because they were the raw material from which the future labor force could be molded. Through the institutions he had created he hoped to set up a institutional model of comprehensive child welfare upon which the government could draw to create a centralized system of national child welfare.
Children; Child Welfare; Arthur Moncorvo Filho