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...