Spanning the 1960s to 1980s, this panel examines four countries: Mexico, Cuba, Chile, and the United States. The following four papers reveal that debates about the family were pivotal to both the socialist and capitalist ideologies which defined the Cold War. By focusing on the institutions which enforced and encouraged different family norms, including women's organizations, feminist organizations, NGOs, and the State, the following papers complicate national histories of the family across the Americas during the Cold War. Sanhueza centers on childhood and family policies during the Cuban Revolution and the various impacts these policies had in Chile during the 1960s. Hernández’s work focuses on how both feminists and the Mexican government re-imagined the definition of the Mexican family through their interpretations of bodily autonomy and gendered conceptions of responsible parenthood during the 1970s. The work of Vidal-Olivares returns to the Chilean case in the neoliberal 1980s and shows that, although the private food industry became a major player in public policies focused on children, the Chilean state remained crucial in the program's development and prepared Chilean children to be discerning food consumers. Lastly, Alpers’s paper underscores the political strength of projecting images of childhood at risk, a strategy that draws crusaders across a broad spectrum of political and religious beliefs, specifically revealing how the Satanic Panic in the 1980s US was intertwined with shifting notions of childhood innocence, family, and race.

Through this panel, we expect to contribute to a scholarly exchange of different meanings of motherhood, fatherhood, children’s well-being, and overall “appropriate” families. These papers together will demonstrate the importance of analytical categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and class in shaping ideals and moral discourses of the family, inspiring state policies, and solidifying childhood as a political category. Lastly, this panel overall proposes to re-examine the concept of the“Inter-American Cold War”, by paying attention to the ways in which the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean worked and had a close relationship and exchange around ideas of family, beyond state-state relations.