ABSTRACT
This book is about a group of 700 children as they reach their fourth birthdays in the English Midland city of Nottingham. It is about the social and material context of their lives: the streets and street-friendships, backyards and neighbours, homes and families, which make up the kaleidoscope of their everyday environment. It is about the emotional tie which forms the core of each child’s experience — his relationship with his parents; and in particular, since he is only four years old, it is about the behaviours and emotions which are generated between the child and that person with whom he spends the greater part of his waking life — his mother.
