In South Africa, 40% unemployment and plummeting marriage rates have put once reliable means of supporting children (e.g., work, husbands, husbands’ family) out of reach. Moral panics about this purportedly new crisis in the family sparked debates about the obligations of citizens and the state to support poor children. Female headed households are viewed as both a problem—evidence of the moral order gone awry—and solution to this alleged crisis. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with women living in a dense inner-city neighborhood, this paper considers the varying livelihood strategies of poor women seeking to secure sufficient resources to support themselves and their families. Though women are expected to translate resources into proper social reproduction, they themselves are not regarded as legitimate recipients of aid. South Africa’s laudable Child Support Grant is designed to “follow the child” who bears the right to state support. An adult, often maternal, caregiver is expected to manage the money in trust. It is only by framing themselves as a caregiver for a rights-bearing child that women gain state recognition. However, this recognition is limited as women can only make claims for the child, not directly for themselves. Additionally, women’s spending of “the children’s money” is subject to a great deal of moralizing critique. Notably, for poor women, the grant’s logic of legitimacy has permeated multiple scales of social interaction. At every level of assistance—from state agencies to proximate neighbors—children are the only subjects seen as deserving beneficiaries. Thus, women often can only access resources through a maternal status. The various sources of aid for inner-city women, such as social workers, church members, neighbors, and boyfriends hold different and often conflicting definitions of desirable—and therefore deserving—motherhood. This paper argues that women navigate these high-stakes evaluations by embodying different maternal personae, enacting the loyal housewife, the disciplinarian, or the indulging auntie, to justify their entitlement to support from each source. These performances require not only careful study of the varying repertories of deserving motherhood but also management of their inevitable contradictions under the watchful eyes of the state as well as one’s community. In this way, women cultivate performances of motherhood as a form of expertise they can leverage for resources, for prestige, and for recognition.