expectations in view of the transition to primary school. The advent of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic changed this final moment of the preschool cycle, and children and their families had to face the lock-down and on-line learning experience. With a series of interviews made in the months of June-July 2020 with the parents of children who had just finished the last year of kindergarten, we tried to understand what the emotional experiences of this population in a delicate moment of transition between school orders were, in a historical period in which, due to emergency needs, on-line learning methods were introduced that had never before been used extensively for this age group.
16 semi-structured interviews were carried out, with the methodology of the explicitation interview (Vermersch, 2005), to the parents of 18 children (9 females, a triplet of dizygotic twins) who attended the last year of kindergarten.
14 mothers and 2 fathers, 14 Italian families, and 2 of foreign origin responded.
The interviews were carried out remotely and videotaped, fully transcribed, and then encoded with content analysis. We analyzed the experiences of children concerning the DAD: their participation, their difficulties, and the positive aspects encountered; moreover, we analyzed the parents’ experience: parents were confronted with a very new task of teachers, but they encountered practical, and technological difficulties as well. The in-depth analysis allowed