Toddlers Collaboratively Explore Possibilities for Actions across Contexts: Developing the Concept Conduct of Everyday Life in Relation to Young Children

In this paper I demonstrate how the concept conduct of everyday life sheds light on how small children (1-2 year) actively explore, act upon, struggle, co-create, negotiate and combine different life conditions together with various co-participants in their everyday life. An argument is made for a more nuanced understanding of the concept conduct of everyday life in relation to small children to gain knowledge about what conditions in everyday life mean to children. This theoretical issue is addressed using data material from an ongoing research project based on cultural-historical research traditions and German-Scandinavian critical psychological conceptualizations. The data material consists of descriptions of scenes from a young boy’s everyday life based on participatory observations in his various everyday life contexts and is used to explore the boy’s engagements in relation to the shared life with various co-participants across contexts.