ABSTRACT
Growing regimes of accountability have increased tension between two distinctly different early years discourses namely those based on social investment paradigms and those based on children's rights. The need to legitimise education through "scientific approaches" after the First World War relegated the "softer and more humanistic aspects" of early years work to the margins and "eclipsed the central importance of caring". There are three key strands to understanding the tensions around caring in early years work. This chapter explores these as a way of unravelling the knot around caring and emotional work in early years practice as it features largely in the stories: the conflation of mothering and early years work which naturalises caring; the impact of the context of early years settings; and the lack of understanding of emotional input/demand. The story in the chapter critically assesses the myth that both caring and emotional work are simply natural traits of early years workers.
