This paper is about the production and circulation of educational ideas and theories. The analysis outlined here, though, is part of a broader study of the professional field of psychological knowledge production of children, childhood and education in the 1930s-1960s building of a Scandinavian welfare state. On the backcloth of former discussions on different approaches to the study of educational theories and ideas, we follow the specific characteristics of a social space and social history approach to the study of educational theories and ideas. This approach comprises three steps: 1) an analyses of the symbolic structures; 2) an analyses of the social structures; 3) an analyses of the transformations of the structures and the individual trajectories. In this paper, then, we are concerned only with step one as we use a selection of professional journals concerned with the children’s education as empirical material in order to analyze the symbolic structures of the space of professional ‘theories and ideas of the child’ in the period of 1928-1953.