Cultural-Historical Wholeness Approach: Critical Activity Settings of More-Than-Parental Involvement

Abstract

This chapter starts with a description of the cultural-historical wholeness approach as a theory of child development. The theory’s considerable focus on the context in which such development takes place makes it capable of theorising the collaboration between different institutions that constitutes the developmental situation of the child. The concepts of an activity setting, in which both societal demands and individual motives intersect, and a crisis are described as productive tools for reflecting on different modes of more-than-parental involvement in ECEC. As an interpretative theory, this toolkit does not impose any particular model of parental involvement, but instead allows for reflection on the conditions that allow for different practices to appear, thus locating the level of eventual change-making.