The changing policy ideals for parental cooperation in early childhood education and care

How parents spend time with their children, what they teach their children and how they raise them in the early years have again become topics of policymaking and public debate. There is an intensive discussion about parental involvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Starting Strong series provides ECEC policy guidelines for national governments that include guides for parental involvement. With inspiration from the sociocultural policy approach, this paper suggests that there has been a shift in the Starting Strong series from underlining policy ideals for parental partnership to focussing on the learning environment. This paper examines how these transnational ideals (re)appear, transform and shift in the ECEC policy documents released in the first two decades of the 21st century in two Nordic countries: Denmark and Finland. Both Nordic countries have been involved in the Starting Strong series since the turn of the millennium. The paper also outlines how transnational ideals have become entangled in policy documents in these Nordic contexts in varied ways and how parental involvement is politicised across each of the two countries. We argue that this politicisation not only marks an intensification in parenting but also attempts to institutionalise the ECEC–family relationship, implying that the parent as well as the child must be enlightened. Thus, we seek to question the process of problematising the parent and the child’s home in the policies and to enable new thinking and action to address this issue.