This paper will present analysis and reflections from an ongoing PhD-study asking what can be learned about learning and development, when explored from young children’s (0–3-year-olds) perspectives in their everyday lives in and across their families and nurseries.

In Denmark and transnationally there has been a growing focus on the importance of early learning. In Danish ECEC-policies the importance of language, children’s communities and perspectives is foregrounded as significant areas of young children’s learning. Pedagogical practice is prompted to arrange learning environments accordingly. Learning though tends to be conceptualized as teaching, highlighting adult-child interactions and both childrens perspectives and communities as means to achieve and optimising learning outcomes. Rather than understood or theorized from the young children’s perspectives, engagements and activities with each other and their material surroundings.This presentation explores how young children take up the social and material arrangements they live their life in, in unpredictable ways. By analysing the children’s attentions and embodied orientations in the sociomaterial arrangements they participate in, the analysis points to ways young children pursuit subjectively meaningful engagements with each other and with objects, both here-and-now and how these engagements develop as over time, related to the children’s personal standpoints and interest. Insisting on exploring learning and development from young childrens perspectives and their engagements as both meaningful and transformative, challenges dominant political ideas on how to arrange and promote ‘good learning environments’ for young children.

The empirical data stems from 1,5-year ethnographic field study, following 6 children in their everyday lives in nursery and with their families. It consists of participatory observations, Sound recordings, photos and in-situ interviews with adults and older children (siblings).The theoretical point of departure is taken in psychology from the standpoint of the subject, with inspirations from both cultural historical psychology and Ingold’s phenomenological anthropology.

This paper explores the role of social psychological theory in understanding family life amid societal transformation. It argues that the social psychology of everyday life offers a politically engaged, interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds the lived experiences of individuals within broader social structures. Drawing on C. Wright Mills, the paper positions theory not as detached observation but as a means of engaging with the “troubles” of family life—troubles that are always also societal issues.

The historical development of family studies is reviewed to show how dominant traditions have struggled to theoretically connect the troubles and issues of family life. In response, the paper discusses the concept of “family practices”, and its relevance for a social psychological approach to family life, emphasizing that families are enacted through everyday interactions shaped by cultural ideals, and socio-material conditions.

The concept of everyday life is not merely a backdrop for the study of psychological phenomenon, but lenses through which ongoing processes of societalisation (vergesellschaftung) is explored, informed by Simmils original idea, that persons are never part of a societal order without also to be found in opposition to that very same order.

In dark times, theory must not retreat into abstraction. Instead, it must illuminate how psychological concepts are entangled with lived realities, offering tools to understand—and potentially transform—the conditions of human life.

As digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life, parasocial interaction and relationships have become central to many people's lives. From social media to subscription platforms like OnlyFans, from dating apps to AI companions, the social self is reorganized into asymmetrical, half- and one-sided formats that offer immediate convenience at the cost of shifting principles of social mechanisms and social organizing. While causality has yet to be shown, at the same time, increasing individualization, loneliness, and experiences of an alienated state of living in disconnection from the body and the world are already traceable.

Based on a multi-method research program, including interviews, surveys, experimental and observational studies, and digital ethnographies, the study presents an integrative concept of the shaping of the parasocial self, depicting how parasocial mechanisms are integrated into everyday life to fulfil social needs, address emotions, regulate, and construct identity. Parasocial forms of interaction are shown to offer immediate gratification and convenience, yet reveal ambivalences: from dating app fatigue and AI-induced emotional investment to relational dissonance in partnerships and affective dependency on mediated others.

The findings are presented as an integrative conceptualization of parasociality, and the graduated becoming of the parasocial self as a constitutive condition of subjectivity in neoliberal digital societies, serving effective push- and pullfactors. The concept of the parasocial self is discussed in terms of mechanisms and meanings, epistemic hierarchies, and broader modifications of sociality, depicting how subjects are both a product and a producer of parasociality, caught between agency and subjugation to algorithmic control.