Continuous economical and cultural changes are inducing various transformations in family functioning and young children education and care. Those changes generated an increased demand for early child education policies. During the last decades, various political and legal advances were observed in many countries. This process, however, took diverse configurations in developed and developing countries. In the European Community, more specifically, the discourse funding those policies emphasized both: children's rights to have access to education and cultural goods and the equality of rights and opportunities for men and women. In developing countries, however, the discourse for rich and poor is different, chiefly in what concerns policies for educational expansion. When the target population is poor, rural and colored, the policies follow a needs approach, of attending poorly the poor. It clearly appears in the World Bank documents. In this paper, a critical analysis of the early child education policies in developing countries is proposed, taking Latin America as a case study.
