This paper discusses the marginalization of the early years of schooling in Australian national gender reform programs. Focusing on an action research project that addressed gender issues in preschool through grade three classes, the paper outlines the issues that teachers faced, the theoretical framework that they used, and the strategies that they employed in having children understand gender relations. The paper describes how teachers worked with children to deconstruct asymmetrical relations of power that were lived out between girls and boys at school. The paper also discusses the teachers' successful employment of a model of critical deconstruction with children in the first years of school. The paper centers on the ways in which young children establish a politics of gender that is largely reflective of what they know operates in the world beyond themselves. (AMC)