This introductory chapter outlines how children are active agents with motives and intentions, and what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being in different age periods. It is therefore relevant for adults who work with children from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age periods. When children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a caring relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day-care or school, and when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

Education and child development are intrinsically intertwined. For us, development is not a predetermined unmediated unfolding of moves toward maturity. Rather, development is seen in relation to cultural expectations recognizing the potential agency of the learner in relation to these expectations. Hedegaard’s Wholeness Approach with its three different perspectives, the societal, the institutional practices and the person’s perspective is central to how we understand children’s development. The societal perspective, gives the conditions that a society with it cultural traditions and values create for children’s participation in different institutional practices. The practice perspective focuses on children’s participation in the different activity settings that characterize a given institutional practice like the breakfast and leaving for school setting, and the homework setting in a family. The demands children meet through participation in these settings are the focus for understanding children’s interactions with caregivers and their social situations. The person perspective focuses on the children’s intentions, agency and motive orientations, which may be different for children in different age periods. We have argued that age periods and the demands children meet as they move through different societal practices are crucial for understanding their social situation of development. Vygotsky’s account of the neoformation of higher psychological functions is introduced and how their emergence in a child’s consciousness changes a child’s relation to their environment and in particular their emotional relation to their world.