This article examines the Chilean State's commitment to the families' welfare, and the specific policies that it designed and implemented to achieve this goal. The analysis of the articulation of benefits in public health and pensions during the formulation and the institutionalization of the Social Security in the 1920s and 1930s, shows that there was an important gap between the legal model of family and the specific ways in which those policies were based applied. At the same time, by analyzing the relation between the state and families, it is possible to understand how the state operated at the social base, and to reassert the political relevance of the family.