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Systematic documentation and analysis of educational practice can be a powerful tool for continuous support to the professionalism of early childhood education practitioners. This paper discusses data from a three-year action-research initiative carried out by a research agency in collaboration with a network of Italian municipal nido services. The action research aimed at elaborating and implementing documentation procedures that nido practitioners could accomplish continuously and that could form the basis of a collegial reflection on children's experience and the improvement of practices. The analysis of practitioners' discussions about weaknesses and strengths of the new procedures shows how they could be inscribed within the framework of their current professional engagement and support their processes of reflexivity. The analysis also highlights the important role of collegiality in sustaining practitioners' analysis, evaluation and improvement of their practice.

This study focuses on mothers' and young children's everyday social experience by analyzing their social relationships, social support in child care, mother-child interaction, and mothers' evaluations of all these aspects. Three hundred and eighty-four mothers with a child aged between 1 and 3 years, living in a city in Central Italy, were interviewed. A Principal Components Analysis was performed on items concerning mothers' and children's social experience and mothers' evaluations. Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother's and child's characteristics. Results show that, even in a context characterized by social conditions supportive to mothering, there is a comparatively widespread desire for social interaction with other mothers and children. A stress related to intensive mothering was found in a minority of the mothers and was predicted by the mothers' continuous commitment in child care during the whole day. Results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that social contacts with other mothers may have a mitigating effect on mothers' stress. One implication is that early educational services that provide the opportunity for social intercourse among parents can be an important resource for them.Analysis of parental activities and experiences in the child's first years of life has recently been urged. Demo and Cox (2000) pointed out that more recent work on families with young children has focused more on children's development and their adjustment than on the experience of parenthood and parents' adjustment.The role of parents' social networks in determining their competence in parenting has been extensively investigated. In a seminal study Cochran and Brassard (1979) suggested three major ways in which parents' social networks affect parenting behavior, i.e., the

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A B S T RA C TThe range of centres where parents and children come together has mushroomed in different parts of the world, as new social work practices address the emerging non-material needs of parents in changing demographic contexts. In this paper, we explore the origins and modi operandi of these centres in Belgium, France, Italy and Japan. Analysis of previous studies and policy documents reveal diverse political rationales, including addressing declining birth rates, preventing psychosocial problems and social isolation of mothers and promoting social cohesion and equality of educational opportunities. Remarkably, despite the diverse cultural and socio-political contexts and rationales, these centres also share very similar ways of functioning and provide an informal type of social support to parents with young children. As these recently emerged centres are seldom studied, further research is welcomed to explore parents' and professionals' perspectives.

A widespread latent demand for educational provision for under 3s exists in Italy. This demand emerges from different material and psychological needs offamilies. In the last twenty years a large network of day care centers for infants and toddlers, asilo nido, have been installed by local governments in many regions of Central andNorthern Italy. These facilities provide daily child care within an educationally oriented context. More recently, new types offacilities have been set up. They stem from the public asilo nido in both cultural and organizational terms and are integrated, together with all the other services, into a local network of educational facilities for young children and their families. The new facilities are aimed at quantitatively expanding the supply of educational provision and at broadening the range of choice for families with respect to their different needs. This paper provides an overview ofthe new facilities.