The family has been the main social unit that the powers try to influence to shape and direct society and to establish new ideologies, especially during periods of social, ideological, and cultural change. This study examines the concept of the ‘new family’ in the 1930s, during a period in Turkey when efforts were made to establish a new regime through various reforms. It considers the role of the press and intellectuals of the time, drawing on family-related, women's, and opinion journals from the era, as well as U.S. archival documents. Among these is the report titled ‘Family Life in the Turkish Republic of the 1930s’, prepared by G. Howland Shaw, an employee at the U.S. Embassy. Thus, by considering the functioning of the press of the period, the article aims to understand which aspects of this issue were examined and discussed by intellectuals, as well as what an outsider's perspective on the new idea of family was. For this purpose, the data for the article were collected through a purposive sampling technique and analysed on a thematic axis. As a result, it was found that a publishing activity was carried out in the magazines in line with the ideological view of the period, giving the family an important role and trying to surround it with contemporary values, but there were important conflicts between the new and old family understandings in the social sense.