Temporal order and emotional rules–Danish children’s navigations in transition from early childhood education and care to primary school

Abstract

This article explores how ‘doing the normal child’ is part of early childhood education and care (ECEC) and the school’s temporal order and emotional rules. We examine how adults and children experience and negotiate temporalities during the transition process, focusing on the emotions connected to those temporalities. Ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken with pedagogues and children from an ECEC setting. We observed visits to a school library undertaken as part of a transition process and examined the temporal orders and emotional rules children encountered when they were welcomed to the school and how they responded. Notably, shame emerged as a crucial emotional rule, upholding explicit time norms such as punctuality. Beyond overt temporal expectations, subtle norms involved acquiring nuanced timing and rhythm within the school sphere, serving as emotional tools for mood regulation and facilitating transitions from spontaneity to focused ‘school concentration mode’. Through these emotional dimensions, children learned vital temporal lessons, enabling their integration into the explicit and implicit temporal and communicative fabric of the educational environment.