Collaborative instrumentalization of family life: How new learning agendas disrupt care chains in the Danish welfare state

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.

Keywords:

• parental collaboration
• early childhood education and care
• parenthood
• chains of care
• everyday life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/R0710.aspx?id=201489, visited October 30, 2019.

2 The child is positioned as someone lacking competencies. Our study also shows that in activities in the ECEC setting, where adult-initiated learning objectives are in focus, taking the children’s perspectives into consideration is difficult, even though the legislation specifically stipulates this, not least because doing so is a profound part of the Danish ECEC tradition. This article, however, does not emphasize the children’s perspectives.

3 https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/R0710.aspx?id=201489, visited October 30, 2019.

4 KL, the association and interest organization of all 98 Danish municipalities, supports municipalities in implementing new acts and in clarifying legal issues, while also developing and offering tools and guidelines to these ends.

5 The project is funded by the Danish Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education and Care, Roskilde University.

6 Via Children’s Intra (Børneintra).

7 https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/R0710.aspx?id=201489 visited November 19, 2019.

8 https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/ft/201712L00160 visited October 30, 2019.

9 Ibid.

10 https://www.bureau2000.dk/CustomerData/Files/Folders/7-seneste-nyheder/1080_b%C3%B8rn-pr-voksen-3008-2019.pdf