Infants in family day care: Stories of smooth and striated space

Family day care (FDC) is child care for a small group of children that occurs in the educator’s home. Despite the important role it plays in the international early childhood education and care landscape, particularly for children under three years of age, FDC is currently under-researched. This paper examines research about infants (under 19 months of age) in FDC from the past 20 years, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of smooth and striated space. These concepts open possibilities for moving beyond well-worn binaries such as qualitative/quantitative, researcher/researched, adult/infant and instead consider the methodological principles and theoretical perspectives that influence why particular methods are chosen, how they are used, and the research stories that result. We argue that the emerging FDC research space may be conceptualised as a smooth space, with greater powers of deterritorialisation than the striated, affording lines of flight towards new understandings about the lives in infants in FDC.