This article evaluates the concept of infant 'belonging', central to several national curricula for early childhood education and care. Here, the authors focus on Australia's Early Years Learning Framework. Four different meanings attach to 'belonging' in the Early Years Learning Framework, the primary being sociopolitical. However, 'a sense of belonging' is also proposed as something that should be observable and demonstrable in infants and toddlers-such demonstration being held up as one of the keys to quality outcomes in early childhood education and care. The Early Years Learning Framework endows belonging with two contrasting meanings when applied to infants. The first, the authors call 'marked belonging', and it refers to the infant's exclusion from or inclusion in defined groups of others. The second, the authors provisionally call 'unmarked' belonging. Differences between these two meanings of infant belonging are explored by describing two contrasting observational vignettes from video recordings of infants in early childhood education and care. The authors conclude that 'belonging' is not a helpful way to refer to, or empirically demonstrate, an infant's mundane comfort or 'unmarked' agentive ease in shared early childhood education and care settings. A better way to conceptualise and research this would be through the prism of infants' proven capacity to participate in groups.

In this article, we endeavour to think spatially about the texture of infants’ everyday lives and their ways of ‘doing’ belonging in the babies’ room in an Australian early childhood education and care centre. Drawing on data from a large, multiple case-study project, and on theorisations of space that reject Euclidean notions of space as empty, transparent, relatively inert containers into which people, objects practices and artefacts are inserted, and instead emphasise space as complex, dynamic and relational, we map the navigating movements (Massumi, 2002) of baby Nadia. Through the telling of ‘stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005), we convey how Nadia, as part of a constellation or assemblage of human and non-human beings, found ways to intensify space and to mobilise new vantage points, thus expanding the spatial possibilities of what we initially took to be a particularly confined and confining space.

This article considers opportunities and risks arising from the prominence of the belonging motif in Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework and, more implicitly, in the National Quality Standard, against which the quality of the early childhood education and care services is assessed. A vignette constructed from case study data generated in the babies’ room in an early childhood centre in an Aboriginal community in rural Queensland is used to illuminate some of these opportunities and risks.

The notion of ‘belonging’ is a core component of many early childhood curriculum frameworks and recognises the importance of children’s sociocultural context for their self-identity and well-being. Children’s risk-taking in play has also been the focus of contemporary research in examining its beneficial role for children’s physical, social and emotional development. This study applies diverse disciplinary and theoretical lenses, including Hedegaard’s cultural-historical model and Gibson’s affordance theory, to present a critical and multi-perspective understanding of children’s experience of ‘belonging’ and risky play. The study involved naturalistic observations of 18–26-month-old children’s outdoor play in an environment designed to provide affordances for risky play. The findings suggest that children’s engagement in risky play also supports their sense of belonging through their shared engagement in risky-play experiences.