Temporal order and emotional rules – Danish children’s navigations in transition from early childhood education and care to primary school

This article explores how ‘doing the normal child’ is part of the school and daycare institutions’ time norms. We examine how adults and children experience and negotiate temporalities during the transition process, focusing on the emotions connected to these temporalities. Through ethnographic fieldwork of when pedagogues and children, as part of a transition process, visit a school library, we examine which time norms and emotions children encounter when they are welcomed at the school and how they act. Notably, shame emerges as a crucial emotional norm, upholding explicit time norms like punctuality. Beyond overt temporal expectations, subtle norms involve acquiring nuanced timing and rhythm within the school sphere, serving as emotional tools for mood regulation and facilitating transitions from spontaneity to focused ‘school concentration mode.’ These emotional dimensions teach children vital temporal lessons, enabling their integration into the explicit and implicit temporal and communicative fabric of the educational environment.