Abstract

This article argues that the latest Danish Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Act has direct implications for the ways in which parents and professionals collaborate about children. The Act introduces a learning agenda that installs an asymmetrical distribution of tasks, which, we argue, may subsequently cause asymmetrical relations between parents and professionals. This asymmetry poses a threat to the shared care arrangement, which has historically characterized the welfare states of Scandinavia. We analyze how the new conditions for collaboration between parents and professionals, stipulated in the recent ECEC Act, are translated and transformed into local polices and everyday practices. In addition to reporting ethnographic research done in two ECEC centers, we analyze how recent policy shifts have implications for the daily collaboration between parents and professionals. We show how the learning agenda marginalizes parents’ perspectives in the collaboration between families and ECEC centers. Our discussion of the consequences emphasizes that possibilities for collaborating on shared care are left unused and that this may contribute to an instrumentalization of familial relations.

摘要

本文认为，最新的丹麦早期儿童教育和保育 (ECEC) 法案对父母和专业人士就儿童进行合作的方式具有直接影响。该法案引入了一个学习议程，该议程设置了任务的不对称分配，我们认为，这可能随后导致父母和专业人士之间的不对称关系。这种不对称对共享照料安排构成威胁，这种安排在历史上一直是斯堪的纳维亚福利国家的特征。我们分析了最近的 ECEC 法案中规定的父母与专业人士合作的新条件如何转化并转化为当地政策和日常实践。除了报告在两个 ECEC 中心进行的民族志研究外，我们分析了最近的政策变化对家长和专业人士之间的日常合作有何影响。我们展示了学习议程如何在家庭和 ECEC 中心之间的合作中边缘化家长的观点。我们对后果的讨论强调，在共享护理方面进行合作的可能性未被利用，这可能有助于家庭关系的工具化。