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This article will report on a project, which consulted children about their understandings of safety in relation to the people and places in their lives. Thirty-nine children aged between three and five years attending preschool and long day-care services reflected on their experiences of what is safe and unsafe in their world through dialogue, artwork and construction. The services were based in an inner city in Australia. The article will then examine discourses of safety to explore how children limit their own capacity and willingness to actively and independently engage with the world outside their family and home due to concerns of safety. This examination raises questions for educators, researchers, policymakers and families about how the effects of how adults observe, monitor and restrict children’s play and movement to keep them in close proximity in order to keep them safe.

The focus of this article is on Finnish pre-school curricula from the early pioneering years to the start of the new millennium (1972–2000). Pre-school has been part of the Finnish education system for nearly 40 years. It has been undergoing a challenging reconstruction process and changes influenced significantly by the increasing call for pre-school education. From 2001, all Finnish municipalities have the obligation to offer and arrange free pre-school education for all six-year-old children a year before compulsory schooling. In this article, pre-school curricula are analysed by examining five written curricula between 1972 and 2000 using qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis. How are the curricula written and how are they changed? The results show that often implicit concepts of the child and childhood determine the content of pre-school curricula. The answers have implications for the development of pre-school education, as well as curricula-related research.