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The article presents the Italian panorama of early childhood services, in the context of children’s families. After an initial introduction to contemporary family models, consisting of numerous family typologies, increasingly isolated on the affective level, the article highlights the role of the early childhood education care (ECEC) initiatives as contexts of “educating and accompanying families”, taking into account the value of "co-education". From this point of view, the individual interview between the educator and the parental couple has changed the meaning of the educator/parents relationship. Inspired by these considerations, action-research was conducted in Tuscany, in 2009-2010. Twelve individual interviews during pre-adaptation were filmed, with the aim of highlighting the strengths and challenges of how educators interact with families. The videos were discussed with the educators, combining research with training, especially in order to reflect in a participatory way on the communication methods that were used with parents of young children when their children were being admitted to kindergartens.