In colonial Egypt, the project of modernization and nation-building did not only involve getting rid of British control and awakening national sentiments, but also to lay claim and control over the population in the name of the nationalist project. In this context, children started appearing as a category of “problem population” that needs to be subjectified, conducted and subverted through government sponsored institutions and projects that targeted children, were premised on the belief in the dependence, vulnerability and malleability of children. Such projects revolved around creating new subjectivities and appropriating them in the service of building the “nascent nation.” By examining a huge body of primary sources at the Egyptian national archives (mainly royal decrees, court orders and parliamentary proceedings discussing draft bills for laws pertaining to juvenile delinquency, child labour, children health and education) and the numerous treatises written by politicians, lawyers, educators, social reformers, psychiatrists and doctors on children and childhood (many of whom were deputies in the parliament and state officials), it becomes clear how the construction of “the new child” subjectivity did not happen tout à coup. The process was rather gradual, taking place in tandem with political, legal, and social upheavals creating discursive changes addressing certain anxieties at each stage and involving a complex process of normalizing, pathologizing, criminalizing, idealizing and fetishizing that ruled out multiple childhoods in favour of a “normal/ideal” middle class childhood that has been elaborately and carefully refined in accordance with the principles of medicine, psychology and education on the one hand and, on the other, in relation to the political goals of a nationalist state as propagated by the middle class effendis and a popular commitment to the family. Another important factor was the change in the governing mentalité, where the state now emerges as parens patriae, having not only a symbolic and emotional interest in the child, but also a political interest and legal responsibility for the protection and well-being of that child. This presentation will show that it is not despite of this one version of middle class childhood but rather because of it, the Egyptian state launched a full fledged project that “institutionalized childhood” both in its policy planning sense and incarcerating sense.