The relationship between parents and school professionals is filled with hope and tension. Both parents and teachers have an interest in the development of children, but parents' interests tend to be the particularized needs of and dreams for their own children. Teachers' interests tend to be focused on maintaining professional autonomy and self-esteem in the face of parental demands, an effort that sometimes conflicts with their obligation to socialize their students to the ways of schools and society (Lightfoot, 1978). Thus, parents and school professionals seem to be alternately cast as partners and antagonists in the education of children. Historically, parents and school personnel have interacted around crises concerning students (Leitch & Tangri, 1988; Lindle, 1989) and students' status in the school (Fine, 1991). Examples of crises include student misconduct and lack of academic progress, and examples of school status include enrolling in and being discharged from school. For the past decade, school professionals have paid increased attention to involving parents more with their children's schooling. The motivation for encouraging parental involvement seems to be the expectation that such involvement will increase students' academic achievement and community support for the school. Little, if any, attention has been focused on parents' motivation for involvement with or their experiences with their children's schooling. The Experience of Sending Children to Kindergarten My interest in parent education, critical pedagogy, and the relationship between families and schools, as well as my experience as a parent, has led me to focus on the research question: What is it like to send a child to kindergarten? There is a touch of surrealism in a child starting kindergarten. It seems that once a child crosses the threshold of the kindergarten room, a parent knows the child is in there, but the parent cannot touch the child; cannot shield him or her from fear, pain, failure, temptation, or danger; cannot offer comfort; and cannot share in the child's joys and accomplishments. A mother may press her nose to an imaginary window of the classroom to watch what happens to her child, but the glass distorts her vision such that she cannot see the whole room. Peering into the kindergarten classroom both allays and increases a parent's anxieties. Everything the parent sees in the room is familiar, but a fraction of the size of the outside world; chairs, desks, sink, scissors, and children are dwarfed in relation to the teacher, whose size seems so large and powerful. In comparison with the teacher, the child seems vulnerable. These and other images occurred to me as my own son entered kindergarten nine years ago. I fretted then, and I continue at times to fret, about not being able to protect my son from the inevitable buffeting at school. I was also concerned that his social, emotional, and intellectual needs be met. I wondered whether he was ready for kindergarten, and whether I was ready for him to go. I anguished over his entry into kindergarten because the state, through the school, began to exert a lot of control over him in contrast to the control my husband and I had been able to assert over his care earlier. I experienced no conflict with the school that year, but I did not like the fact that the kindergarten teacher's authority could supersede mine under certain conditions. My son's backpack and school supplies were symbols of his entrance into a large, bureaucratic, impersonal, societal institution beyond my grasp. He would increasingly have to make it on his own. As I read about kindergarten and parents, it became clear that I was not alone in my concern about my son starting kindergarten. Other parents struggle with preparing their children for kindergarten, too (Graue, 1933a; Harris & Lindauer, 1988). Parents wonder whether their children should go to kindergarten this year or wait a year. …