This article is part of an ethnographic study that explores processes of social intervention relating to children “with violated rights” in a state device in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. I focus on the actions of institutional agents and their interactions with the “beneficiaries”, which constitute the most common dimension of the “policy of comprehensive protection of the rights of children”. Here I explore some implications of the new forms of relations between the administrative devices and the families and adults “responsible” for the children’s immediate environment. This reconfiguration is characterized by an asymmetric complementarity between administrators and those they administer to, which is constitutive of the modes of managing childhood in contemporary times.