ABSTRACT
The 700 Nottingham children whom we last saw as four-year-olds have undergone the changes of three significant years. As we bring them once more into focus, the most obvious transformation is one of status: from a home-bound child whose autonomy was limited by the garden gate, or, at most, by the first street corner, to a schoolchild, inhabiting for the larger part of the day a world in which his mother has little part. At four we observed how much parents were motivated in their efforts towards socialisation by this impending change in the child’s life-style: ‘I don’t want the teacher to think I’ve made her quite helpless’. At seven, a sense of change in the child himself is often made very explicit.
