While Europe is experiencing new transnationalism based on technical economic links, European preschool education is not as accommodating to multicultural growth as economic growth has been. In many schools, children are forced to learn and interact in a language foreign to them. This break with their mother tongue is also a break with maternal ties, causing tension between home and school. Language learning and usage both reflects and affects social relationships. In the preschool setting, the child is apt to feel alienated and to experience intense pressure to lose ties to their mother tongue by rapidly learning the language of the school. In this context, the child experiences conflict in trying to integrate multiple identities into a unified form of written and oral expression. This experience is akin to the psychoanalytic notion of transference, where a child redirects desires formerly focused on parents to new groups. Preschool staff may underestimate the tensions involved in integrating children, and their parents, into a preschool setting. This underestimation can lead to misunderstanding and alienation of both parents and children. (JW)