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This paper examines the implications of various learning-centred initiatives for the relationship between early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions and families in Denmark. Since the 1990s, promoting early learning has been a key objective for Danish ECEC institutions, reshaping the Danish social pedagogy tradition. Recently, early learning initiatives have become part of the collaboration with parents on so-called home learning. Based on ethnographic studies of such collaboration, I argue that the expansion of dominant early learning agendas from ECEC to families results in an institutionalisation of parenthood. The analysis shows that parents are expected to embrace a learning agenda promoted by ECEC professionals. They are appointed as learning facilitators who must strive to support early learning at home and improve their parenting skills. Furthermore, parents' engagement in early learning is intertwined with the practical organisation of family life and with ideals of a good family and a good childhood.

This article explores how school is materialised within Danish families and the significance for both children and parents. Based on ethnographic research and inspired by materiality studies and by family and childhood studies, the analysis describes how school‐related objects, such as schoolbags, actualise school within the family and create intensive 'school parenting'. The article also illustrates how the materialisation of school both entangles with family routines, becoming part of being a family and feeds into processes of demarcation and ways of reducing the importance of school in family routines.

The anthology In-Between: Exploring Small Cracks of Everyday Life is a collection of empirically based texts all of which are based on ethnographic (field)work. The joint interest shared by the contributing authors evolve around the small, unnoticed and seemingly insignificant phenomena that occur in the arenas of everyday life. The work is founded on an ambition to foreground, analyse and emphasise the major resonance and importance of the myriad minor cracks we encounter in our most ordinary and mundane doings; the sensations, affects, impressions, inexplicable small-scale experiences and in-between phenomena that are part of being alive and being human. Taking off from empirical settings such as schools, homes, institutions and urban spaces the chapters focus on the material, sensory and bodily aspects of belonging, inhabiting, learning, becoming and living.0The contributors all have a background in educational anthropology. The anthology is aimed at students and researchers with an interest in cultural analysis as well as at others that share the infatuation with the many wonderous small cracks and unnoticed phenomena inherent to everyday life

Ethnographic studies offer insight into parents' involvement in and management of children's and young people's school lives in a Danish context. In light of the growing demand for parental involvement in school, the article explores the emotional work that families' interactions with the school imply and their attempts to avoid unwanted categorisation or stigmatisation. At the core of the article are three cases drawn from a larger study of home-school relations in Denmark. The three cases present examples of the emotional work involved when children and young people are categorised by the school as 'students with inappropriate behaviour'. Drawing on Erwin Goffman's concepts of frontstage, backstage and impression management, the analysis emphasises how these families' management of their children's school lives is dominated by time and effort spent dealing with feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. Furthermore, the study shows how parents and children struggle to gain recognition and avoid the school's categorisation of them.

This edited collection shows that good parenthood is neither fixed nor stable. The contributors show how parenthood is equally done by men, women and children, in and through practices involving different normative guidelines. The book explores how normative layers of parenthood are constituted by notions such as good childhood, family ideals, national public health and educational strategies. The authors illustrate how different versions of parenthood coexist and how complex sets of actions are demanded to fulfil today's expectations of parenthood in Western societies. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to research scholars in child and family studies, students, experts, social workers, politicians, teachers and parents. Anna Sparrman is Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies - Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Allan Westerling is Associate Professor at the Department of People and Technology and the Centre for Childhood, Youth and Family Life research at Roskilde University, Denmark. Judith Lind is Lecturer at Department of Thematic Studies - Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Karen Ida Dannesboe is Assistant Professor at the Department of Educational Anthropology, School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.

In Denmark, a process of defamilising has taken place since the expansion of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector in the 1960s, in the sense that children now spend a large part of their childhood outside the family. Nevertheless, parents are still seen as key figures in children's upbringing and as having primary responsibility for the quality of childhood, implying a simultaneous process of refamilising. Based on ethnographic fieldwork we show that parents are not only held responsible for their children's lives at home, but also for ensuring that ECEC staff have the best possible opportunity to support children's development at ECEC institutions. We analyse how ECEC staff offer guidance on how to be a responsible parent who cooperates in the right ways, and on how to cultivate children's development at home. Parents willingly accept such advice because of a strong risk awareness embedded in diagnostic forms, positioning ECEC staff as parenting experts.