Abstract
Methods are not neutral instruments but construct the phenomena under investigation and convey meaning about what is important. This paper explores a methodological framework to investigate parental care for children. As part of the results, the following characteristics of how parents take care of their children are presented: continuous responsibility; predictable routines that are adjusted to the child; and interpretations and negotiations about developmental goals. The argument is that methodological approaches that analyse larger temporal units of contextualized practices as presented by the participants themselves open up for more context-sensitive knowledge about the task of taking care of children. Thus, the understanding of the process of development is widened and specified in a way that may be useful for fields of practice where developmental psychology is ‘at work’.