Negotiating responsibility in a shared care arrangement - between parents and ECEC professionals.

This paper focuses on parents' daily collaboration with ECEC professionals. Based on preliminary findings from my ongoing Ph.D. study, I illuminate how parents negotiate tasks and responsibilities for their child(ren) in encounters with professionals.
For a year, I have conducted ethnographic field study designed as participant observations of 10 parents in two ECEC contexts. Furthermore, I have interviewed parents and professionals, using life mode interviews. To understand the shared care between parents and professionals I draw on the concept ‘chains of care’ as it contributes with an understanding of the collaboration, where parents and professionals each are considered to comprise on part of a chain of care in the child's life, while emphasizing that parents bear the overall responsibility for each link between the parts of the chain as well as the chain as a whole even when leaving the child in daycare.
To examine how parents take up and negotiate responsibility in ECEC, this paper takes its departure in empirical data reporting from a parent council meeting where several parents and professionals participate. At the meeting, the focus is on the food policy in the ECEC and the children’s packed lunch they bring from home. Using the packed lunch as an example of division of labor, I present and discuss my preliminary analysis on how parents negotiate responsibility with the professionals and how parents are expected to support an institutional agenda to make the pedagogical practice easier by adhering to the specific ‘packed lunch policy’ set by the professionals.