Discourses of love, care and maternalism affect the everyday lives of children enrolled in early childhood education. These discourses bear witness to the ontological transformation that has occurred since the Romantic era that birthed the kindergarten movement to today. Reflecting on historical discourses of love, care and maternalism from the Romantic era, this article considers how the historical development of these discourses affects our professional understandings of love, care and maternalism in early childhood education.

Young children spend an increasing amount of time in out of home care, as neuroscientific research reveals the pivotal role love and touch plays in children's development. In response to this new knowledge, there is a growing interest in love and touch in the context of early childhood education. Sadly, cases of sexual abuse in ECEC settings have ignited fear and uncertainty among stakeholders in regards to what kind of touch and how much love is appropriate to feel for children in ECEC. Research exploring love in early childhood education tends therefore to be concerned with creating certainty in regards to love as a safe and healthy practice. This focus, though neccesary to develop knowledge about love, also silences other uncertain aspects of love in the context of early childhood education that affect early childhood educators. Drawing on Karen Barad's diffraction methodology, this article engages a diffractive analysis and transforms educators' solicited narratives of love in pedagogic practice into love poems. The poems attend to the overflowing quality of love as an uncertain, ephemeral phenomenon, invoking moments of pleasure and the desire to connect with children as personal matters, rather than solely professional concerns.

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Caring relationships between children and educators in early childhood education and care centers become in an array of entanglements with spaces, materials, and the organization of time. An exclusively dyadic understanding of care is insufficient in the material, institutional, pedagogic, and professional environment of early childhood education and care. This article reports on an ethnographic study of material and organizational professional care practices in a high-functioning full-day early childhood education and care center for children less than 3 years in Norway. Drawing on Tronto and Fisher's feminist care ethics and a posthuman perspective, the study's aim was to gain knowledge about how early childhood educators perform care as a professional practice beyond the dyad. The article explores care through the lens of a disruption in daily activities, when the laying down of new flooring in the center produced changes in the otherwise highly functioning caring environment. Changes in the availability of materials and the organization of space and time are analyzed using Malabou's concept of plasticity. The effects of the agentic force of material changes on the caring practices of the center, despite the already strong and established dyadic relationships between the children and educators, are discussed.

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Care is traditionally researched in ECEC as a dyadic, human phenomenon that relies heavily of tropes of females as care providers. The assumption that care is produced in dyadic relationships occludes material care practices that occur beyond the dyad. Drawing on Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto’s care ethics and Karen Barad’s focus on the agency of materiality, I have sought to explore how care is produced outside of dyadic relations in ECEC and how that care relates to domestic practices and flourishing in ECEC.

This collective writing project considers the central issue of how we account for, understand, and talk about, the professional work of care in early childhood education. As an international collective, we stake out some of the messiness, the specificities and complexities of care in early childhood education. Each scholar explores the issue of foregrounding care in the professional work of early childhood educators and reflects on the complexities of care in early childhood education and care. While these musing are collected together in this paper, they are each a standalone provocation to grapple with diverse issues of care in relation to etymology, policy, risk, relationships, power, and racism. As a collective, we explore ways of engaging in the messiness of care and education with a spirit of vulnerability and the courage of risk taking to unpack care in early childhood education.

This article explores children’s play with representations of animals, specifically the Holstein cow, as noninnocent care practices in the context of early childhood education and care environments. We use Barad’s relational ontology and Chaudhuri’s concept of zooësis to activate a temporal diffractive analysis of memory stories about children’s play with cows in ECEC read through facts from past, present, and future livestock-rearing practices. We connect the joy of playing with representations of nonhuman animals to the responsibility associated with multispecies lives, and to care as the production of flourishing.