Boundary Care Practices and Ethical Dilemmas

This chapter contributes with research on early childhood educators care-work with children in nurseries, understood and analyzed in relation to professional ethical perspectives and foundations. Care is prescribed as a central value in the code of ethics, which means that early childhood educators are ethically committed to creating an everyday life for children based on trust, security, and empathy.
Based on empirical examples, the chapter will analyze and discuss how social educators care for young children. Based on critical psychological dimensions and social practice theory it will be discussed how care can be conceptualized as a ‘chain of care’ and as pedagogical ‘boundary work’ in the boundaries between daycare and children’s family life. Thus, producing ethical dilemmas for the way pedagogical professionalism and pedagogical moral judgment unfolds in practice.