Tracing the spatiality of day care childhoods. Children’s participation in the daily production of the diverse spaces of ECEC

‘Day-care-childhoods’ are not only performed in the confined spaces of certain kinds of day care facilities as ethnographic research on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) often suggests. Rather, parents combine diverse settings to more or less complex chains of care arrangements. Particularly, in the case of Luxembourg, ECEC is divided into a sector of care and a sector of education that parents combine. Observed from the ‘vantage point’ of children, these care-arrangements cause various horizontal transitions during the course of a child’s day/week and therefore create distinct spaces of positioning and actorship. The spatiality of care-arrangements is shaped by patterns of mobility as well as the strength of enacted borders between the diverse settings, which the children have to cross on a daily basis. The Luxembourgian CHILD-Study traces those border-crossing-practices of children in ECEC that manifest as the ‘localized connections’ of ECEC-policies, familial care strategies and organizational routines. From a practice-analytical view this study asks: How do young children (age 2-4) actively participate in socio-material practices of setting up and crossing borders and create diverse spaces of ECEC? The presentation will introduce the welfare-theoretical perspective and the practice-analytical approach of the study and present the analyses of two ethnographic case studies on children’s care-arrangements and their respective spatial practices and border-crossings.