This vignette typifies the meetings that took place between us, a group of researchers and parents, during collaborative research over a number of years near Clifton Park in Rotherham. As part of our collaborative ethnography, we organised a series of family den-building events, with community partners, in order to think through how children learn and have experiences in places. We aimed explicitly to draw across and value different kinds of knowledge about young children – professional practitioner knowledge, academic knowledge, and particularly the knowledges gained from everyday lived experiences of being parents and children.

These kinds of everyday knowledges about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of parenting young children are rarely represented or valued in policy discourses, and therefore risk being overlooked in practical initiatives designed to help or support families with young children in communities. By foregrounding and valuing these everyday lived experiences of families and children, we hope to offer more realistic accounts of what it means to parent young children, which we think should inform policy and practice regarding how young children should be cared for and should participate in communities.