Robin Lynn Leavitt presents in a provocative ethnography the lived experiences of infants and toddlers in day care centers. This text speaks to researchers and instructors interested in infancy, early childhood socialization, child care, and interpretive research. Leavitt's original application of multiple theoretical perspectives--interpretive, interactionist, critical, feminist, and postmodern-- yields powerful insights into the problematic emotional experiences and relations between infants and their caregivers.

The day care center is described as an institution that imposes a temporal...

Play has been part of early childhood programs since the initial kindergarten developed by Friedreich Froebel more than one hundred and fifty years ago. While research shows that most teachers value children's play, they often do not know how to guide that play to make it more educational. Too often, in reflecting the value of child-initiated activities, teachers set the stage for children's play, observe it, but hesitate to intervene in that play. They may fear that to intervene is to create a developmentally inappropriate set of educational practices. However, the lack of intervention may...