Collaboration Between Childcare and Parents: Dilemmas and Contradictory Institutional Conditions in the Institutional Arrangement of Child Care

In Denmark, as in many other countries, children live their lives across different contexts, primarily in the home and in childcare institutions. The child’s contexts are simultaneously both separated and related. On the one hand, the family and childcare are not automatically involved in each other’s arrangements, but on the other hand, they are structurally connected and continuously interacting due to the crossover of the children’s activities. Therefore, collaboration and coordination between parents and professionals is an important part of childcare practice. Based on comprehensive empirical work in different Danish childcare centres, this chapter discusses how parental collaboration in the pedagogical practice is often a rather paradoxical effort, developed in relation to contradictory historical and institutional conditions and requirements to treat parents both as equal participants, consumers and clients. In this way, challenges and dilemmas in parental collaboration in childcare are analysed in relation to larger societal conflicts about the relation between society and citizen and the overall purpose of childcare as state institutions.