Abstract This article reviews the institutional concepts associated with child protection in Bogota, Colombia, from the 16th century to the present, and studies how these concepts merged with the neoliberal discourse at the beginning of the 21st century in the care practices that are carried out. The article shows how state institutions in charge of child protection base their activities on ideological representations that involve techniques of control, surveillance and punishment of domestic units, which are presented as dysfunctional insofar as the children are seen as vulnerable. The article concludes that this exercise perpetuates social and spatial segregation in the city to legitimise the governance of child care. Ethnographic work carried out in the period between 2012 and 2017 in the Centro Único de Recepción de Niños (Unique Child Reception Centre) in Bogotá, is taken as a point of reference for the analysis.