This article offers a case-study of specific shifts in the view of state responsibility for the less fortunate in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Current welfare policy aims to reduce the state benefits of parents if they do enrol their preschool children in an early childhood centre. I undertake a genealogical investigation and suggest that state anxieties about the disadvantaged are not new: Edu-welfare policies are the last in a long line of attempts to govern state beneficiaries and their children. Economic policies which arose in the specific historical, political and social contexts of the United States, I argue, should not be uncritically imposed as universal solutions to perceived risks to the body politic of other states.