**1. Introduction**

There is wide agreement that the early years of life are crucial for both the health and social outcomes of children. Family support services aim to promote children's health and well-being through the provision of holistic support to the whole family. Open Kindergartens are one way of providing support that is not targeted toward a single child, or even one family, but rather an initiative that aims to support families by bringing them together. In this chapter, I present three distinctive characteristics of this form of family support and apply the concept of communities of practice to show how supporting children and families can be understood as a collective learning process.

Norwegian children are entitled to attend kindergarten from the age of one. If they turn one by the end of July they will be accepted in August, or by the end of the month if the child turns 1 year old in the autumn. The municipality is accountable for ensuring sufficient capacity to provide a kindergarten place for all children that are inhabitants in the municipality. In 2020, 92.7% of children 1–5 years old attended publicly funded kindergartens [1]. Despite a strong economy and wellestablished education and social welfare services health inequalities in Norway are increasing [2, 3]. For the youngest children, the family is the main unit of care. Therefore, universal services that support families are an important aspect of health promotion for the youngest children.

Open Kindergartens are a low threshold service for young children and their caregivers. Parents' education is often organized in individual consultations or group sessions with other parents as a part of reflexive praxis, talking about parenting without the children being present. The family support initiative that is presented here, the Open Kindergartens, differs from ordinary kindergartens by being a meeting place that children and their caregivers attend together, as opposed to ordinary kindergartens where the children attend while the parents are absent. Open Kindergartens, therefore, are not a replacement or alternative for kindergartens.

Open Kindergartens are not targeted at a specific group of parents or children but rather are open to all. The broad representation of families using Open Kindergartens marks them out as a universal intervention. The families can come and go as it suits them during opening hours and there is no requirement to make an appointment, apply or have a referral. The families that use the service are widely varied in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, and employment status [4]. From the parents' perspective, attending an Open Kindergarten was experienced as beneficial both for themselves and their child(ren) [5]. Norwegian municipalities have delegated responsibility to provide family support services. While ordinary kindergartens and health care centers for children are a mandatory part of the services that municipalities must offer, Open kindergartens are not, and therefore are not available to all parents and children in Norway. The decision not to provide Open Kindergartens is often justified by limited resources and a desire to prioritize more targeted, rather than universal, interventions.

The Open Kindergartens discussed in this chapter are all part of municipal family centers that provide interdisciplinary services for children, adolescents, and their families. The first family centers were established between 2002 and 2004 in a pilot initiated by the Norwegian Health Authorities, inspired by a Swedish Family Centre Model [6]. Following the pilot, this form of family support was recommended and in 2012, 150 family centers were established throughout the country [7]. The family centers were intended to contribute to strengthening families and supporting children and adolescents in their formative environment. The Open Kindergartens in this study are integrated into the provision of the family centers, as a low threshold service that aims to promote health through providing a setting where families can meet other families with young children, share experiences, build networks as well as meet professionals that specialize in young children and family support. Family centers providing a range of family support services are found in countries throughout the world, including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Japan, France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and Norway [8–12]. Typically, health and social services are co-located in the family center and provide a range of services. The centers are diverse in the forms of support that they offer and how they are organized but typically provide health-care services for children, pregnancy care, child welfare services, pedagogical-psychological services, and Open Kindergartens. While the centers in this study provided diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts and different rationales for their creation they shared very similar approaches and provided informal social support to parents with young children [11, 13].

There is no current data on the number of Open Kindergartens provided across Norway. But in 2012, the mapping of Norwegian family centers found that a quarter of the centers had an Open Kindergarten [7]. Being located in the family centers made interdisciplinary collaboration easier [9], although the potential for collaboration was not always fulfilled [14]. The Open Kindergartens were a distinctive space that created opportunities for informal learning between parents and professionals, creating a distinctive community of practice that drew on the diverse cultural resources of the parents who attended and the range of professionals involved.
