Preliminary Programme

The paper explores the change in mass media discussions about extra-familial day care for children under three in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) since the 1970s on the basis of a content analysis of German newspapers. For this period, Mierendorff (2013) noted a readjustment of the relationship between family, state and intermediary institutions, resulting in an enormous increase in the number of toddlers in day care facilities, from 20,428 in 1973 to 829,163 in 2020 (Federal Statistical Office, 1974 & 2020).
Combining a qualitative and a quantitative research approach (Görgen & Fangerau, 2017), it is shown that in the 1970s extra-familial day care for toddlers was hardly present in mass media, which can be interpreted as a profound skepticism. If mentioned, crèches were associated with socialist states, from whose supposedly anti-family policies the FRG was discursively strongly distinguished. Furthermore, crèches were evaluated under the perspective of the temporary interruption of the mother-child relationship, on the basis of which pediatricians and psychologists in particular predicted an impairment of early childhood development. According to these ideas, instead of expanding extra-familial day care in the FRG, maternal employment needed to be reduced by financially supporting their child-rearing activities. These reservations slowly disappeared by the late 1990s. They were replaced by interpretative schemes that were very positive about day care under the perspective of enabling maternal employment. Additionally, a more recent interpretative scheme emphasized the right of a toddler to Early Education and Care in a day care center. These developements were closely linked to international research projects like OECD‘s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) or Starting Strong and policies of the European Union like the Barcelona Goals on Child Care.
The article will conclude by contrasting this change in mass media discussions with the social theory of acceleration (Rosa, 2005). The economic development, rising educational qualifications and a new female self-image resulted in the inclusion of more and more women in the labour market. Furthermore, educational processes were placed into early childhood, which increasingly transformed it into a temporal resource in the competition for educational opportunities and social mobility.

Görgen, Arno/ Fangerau, Heiner (2017): Media Conjunctures of Child Protection Debates in the Federal Republic of Germany - Reconstruction of a Culture of Looking and Mindfulness. In: Heiner, Fangerau/ Bagattini, Alexander/ Fegert, Jörg M./ Tippelt, Rudolf/ Viehöver, Willy/ Ziegenhain, Ute (Eds.): Strategies to Prevent Sexual Abuse in Educational Settings. Child Welfare as a Collective Orientation Pattern. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juventa.
Mierendorff, Johanna (2013): Normalization Processes of Childhood in the Welfare State. The Example of the Regulation of Early Childhood. In: Kelle, Helga/ Mierendorff, Johanna (Eds.): Standardization and Normalization of Childhood. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juventa.
Rosa, Hartmut (2005): Acceleration. The Change of Time Structures in Modernity. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Federal Statistical Office (1974): Public Social Welfare. Series 2. Youth Welfare. Mainz: Kohlhammer.
Federal Statistical Office (2020): Childcare Rates of Children under the Age of Three Has Risen to 35 Percent. Press Release Nr. 380. www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2020/09/PD20_380_225.html;jsessionid=B2D21C7BB29A6484E89DCE8E2BCB3992.internet8722 (Show less)

Swedish preschooling has gone through a remarkable development during the last 50 years. In the middle of the 1960s no more than 2 per cent of Swedish children under the age of 6 attended preschools or daycare centers, which can be compared with the situation today when the corresponding proportion is 86 per cent (Statistisk årsbok 1971-2014 & Skolverket.se). Earlier research on this process has either focused on the political parties’ attitudes towards welfare systems or more internal discussions on preschooling within the preschool sector (See e.g. Hinnfors 1992 and Folke-Fichtelius 2008; Hammarström-Lewenhagen 2013).
In this paper I will focus on the attitudes towards preschooling as an alternative to parents staying home and taking care of their children. This is done by foremost analyzing debates in the Swedish parliament concerning the introduction of childcare allowances for parents taking care of their own children, as these debates often centered around the choice between preschools and daycare or letting parents stay home with their children.
Results from this analysis show that the debate changed during this period, from being a question about giving women the opportunity to earn a living by full time employment to the possibility for children to attend preschool as part of their development in a democratic society. The debates that took place in the Swedish Parliament also entailed different lines of conflicts, such as how early childhood education and care should be organized. During the 1960s liberal and conservative parties argued in favor of small-scale family daycare while the left-wing parties favored daycare centers.
In the 1980s the right for parents to choose between different forms of childcare became an important question as the result of the attempt to open commercial preschools in Sweden (Westberg & Larsson 2020). In that context the liberal and conservative parties argued in favor of state funded childcare vouchers that parents could use to either buy childcare or as childcare allowances for parents that stayed home to take care of their children. The left-wing parties on the other hand saw these reforms as something that would threaten both the efforts made towards gender equality and the expansion of the Swedish preschool system.
As a result of the right-wing government that came into office in 2006 Swedish municipalities were given the opportunity to issue childcare allowances for parents that instead of sending their children (between one and three years old) to preschool took care of the children by themselves. This system was in place between 2008 and 2016, and was abolished by the left-wing government that took office in 2014. Since then the debate on childcare allowance in parliament has subsided. This can be seen in the light of the strong expansion of the preschool sector, which has resulted in that the vast majority of children attend preschool today.
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This paper focuses on child culture in postwar Norway, a period described as the child culture’s classical years. Since the number of children born in the postwar years was numerous, with 1946 as the most numerous year crowds of children dominated urban landscapes at that time. Children were neither before nor after, on their own and uncontrolled like in these years. The specific uncontrolled child-culture stands out as one main signifier of growing up in postwar Norway.
The aim of this paper is to investigate how children were educated and educated children within that time’s specific child culture. Child-cultural activities often presupposed complicated cooperation in which children learn to negotiate, mediate, compromise and solve social problems. In a child cultural setting the child is seen as subject and agent and the perspective is on informal learning processes and practical embodied knowledge. Further, learning is seen as a reciprocal process in which children themselves were masters. Children transmitted skills and practical knowledge from one child generation to the next.
The paper is based on 48 interviews with women and men, most of them born in the 1940s and 1950s. Interviewers from the Norwegian Folk Museum collected them in 2016 and 2017. The interviews are digitalized and archived in Norwegian Ethnographic Collections (NEG 0259) where they serve as a memory bank available for researchers as well as the general public. The interviewees were asked about play in childhood and the respondents are both women (26) and men (22) and from rural (15) and urban (33) areas in different parts of Norway. (Show less)

In Sweden, the State started to pay attention to the role of preschool (early childhood education and care) in the 1940s to 1960s. Several governmental inquiries were commissioned to investigate the role of preschool for the development of the society. At the same time, research about children in preschool was initiated. The research was based on child psychology with an interest in quantitative methods based on observations of individual children (Lindgren & Söderlind, 2022). In this paper, the focus is on children’s play in both the political apparatus and in scientific research. A theoretical starting point is Carol Bacchi’s (2012) ‘What's the Problem Represented to be’-approach (WPR). Hence, the study concerns what presuppositions or assumptions underpinned the representations of play, how the representations of the ‘play-problem’ came about, what was left unproblematic in the problem representation and can be thought about differently? (Bacchi, 2012). In presenting play as a ‘problem’, or an ideological tool, the analysis is inspired by Cook (2018) and Lindgren (2006). The aim is to explore what the effects of play was supposed to achieve, in addition to the notions of gender and agency that were produced in the problem-solution matrix presented in research and politics about play. In short, the scientific discourse on play is combined with play in the state preschool political discourse, i.e. how play, gender and agency was enacted in the governmental inquiries about preschool and in research from the period.

Bacchi, C. (2012). Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. In: Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley (Eds), Engaging with Carol Bacchi (Cambridge University Press, pp. 21-24).
Cook, D. T. (2018). Panaceas of Play: Stepping Past the Creative Child. In: Spyrou, S, Rosen, R., and Cook, D.T Reimagining Childhood Studies (Bloomsbury Academic Press, pp. 123-136).
Lindgren, A-L. (2006). Från små människor till lärande individer. Föreställningar om barn och barndom i utbildningsprogram 1970–2000 (Lund: Arkiv Förlag).
Lindgren, A-L, and Söderlind, I. (2022). Förskolans historia. Förskolepolitik, barn och barndom (Malmö: Gleerups). (Show less)