I discuss the results from the research that sought to know the media discourses on paternity and its effects on subjectivation ways. Here I approach one of the identified statements: the child is a person in development and therefore needs his father. I focus in four aspects: the importance of the concept of development for the codification of childhood and children and adult's social control; the way the fathers and mothers positions were being constructed as distinct and hierarchically unlike places; the changes in the status of children and parents; the growing primacy of knowledge/power of experts opposing parental knowledge.
discourse; childhood; paternity; gender; experts