Struggling against a feeling of becoming lost: a young boy's painful transition to day care

The article covers one aspect of a current research project, ‘Toddlers' Adjustment to Out-of-Home Care’. Financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), it is conducted at the University of Vienna, and is introduced in the present paper in much compressed form. The project operates with an interdisciplinary design, which includes Young Child Observation as a research tool. While data of 100 children are collected and analysed by the use of different research methods, 11 of these children have been observed during the first six months of day care. At the focus of the present paper stands a one-year-and-nine-month-old little boy named Valentine. The (anonymous) day care centre where he spends several hours of each day is distinguished by its modern architectural design, as well as the fact that the children are kept in ‘mixed age groups’ and taken care of with what is called an ‘open group approach’. Within these given structures, the caregivers appear unable to provide Valentine with a feeling of security and comfort. Since he cannot gain the experience of being represented within the minds of the caregivers as a child who requires continual attention and care, he receives scant emotional support in his struggle to overcome the painful experience of being separated from his parents – an experience that soon swells up to a feeling of ‘becoming lost’. The fact that the caregivers in Valentine's case (but in other cases as well) only to a limited extent perceive, understand, or in any desirable way consider the toddlers' painful feelings, points to a similar conclusion – an assumption of the existence of institutionalised defenses, whose significance should be taken into consideration if changes in this area are to be aspired to.