ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the observations that highlight one aspect of children’s lives. Even quite small children often live in more than one culture of care, home and childminding, home and nursery, for example. Within the family there will be a range of mini-cultures: father and mother will themselves provide different styles of care, grandparents, babysitters, older siblings, aunts and uncles, still more new experiences. Young child observers are always mindful of the picture of home in the child’s mind as a background to the response to nursery, but it is more unusual to have an example of a child’s transition within nursery school from one class to another. The intensity of Jonathon’s reaction to joining a new class, even one that shared a large space with his old group and where there was overlapping of some staff, is a vivid example of the way in which a sense of personal identity and security is easily threatened at times of transition.
