This thesis – Come, now I am waiting for you – Institutionalization and quality of interactions in daycare: a comparative study – registered in the field of education, discusses the process of institutionalization of early Childhood Education and the quality of daily relationships in daycare. From an ethnographic perspective, two daycares were surveyed, one public and one community, in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro, observing the interaction among the children aged three and four in two different classrooms, in each daycare center. The theoretical and methodological references were linked together by way of various authors, especially Corsaro, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Certeau, aiming to establish a relationship between the process of institutionalization of early childhood education and the everyday interactions of children. The thesis was an exercise in the understanding of everyday activities of the daycare centers, considering children as subjects who, besides being subjected to the processes of institutionalization and familialization, express themselves both individually and collectively, interfering in these processes, showing the dialectical relationship between the macro and micro dimensions of policies and interactions. The concepts of interpretive reproduction and peer culture of Corsaro were the basic tools to observe the children, even in controlled and restricted situations, identifying their power of imagination and creation and identifying their potential to interpretively reproduce the world around them. The analyses revealed what is most important for children in these two institutional spaces: (i) interactions and collective actions that, in the process of interpretive reproduction, favor the creation of strategies for the production of peer culture; (ii) peer culture has its locus in play, but not limited to it; (iii) settings that children experience institutionally in classroom play, are repeated in moments of free play during recess; (iv) children s manifestations characterize all of the space and time of daily institutional activities, disguised as pedagogical value.