This paper seeks to identify and analyze the professionals' perception about mothers who care for children between 0 and 6 years old. Professionals from the Family Health Strategy were interviewed: doctors, nurses and nursing technicians/assistants. The research took place in two districts of Florianópolis/SC. Through content analysis, we identified that, although professionals realize that mothers keep on using public health care, they claim that learning child's basic care in the family subsystem has changed, as familiy life conditions do not encourage home care. This aspect, along with the consequences of implementation of a new design of public health services particularly for basic care and available on a large scale to the population, tend to make women more dependent on health services and children's care more medicalized.
child care; culture; family health