In this article, we juxtapose Norman Fairclough’s (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis with the history of childhood in order to analyze children’s and adults’ agency in a Swedish kindergarten during the 1930s. We use a primary source, a child observation, to study the role of initiatives, i.e. actions, in a situation where the children were playing kindergarten. The main question posed concerns the new insights that we can gain into children’s and adults’ agency when studying initiatives as a form of agency involving compliance (Gleason 2016). The article shows that demonstrating how to comply with a situation could be part of how a child could contribute to, and build, a shared preschool identity, formed by an interdependence that included both children and adults. The focus is not on whether or not a child could play an agentic role in relation to adults, but rather on how the collective decision-making involving children and adults was affected by their respective capacities to contribute. In addition to the analysis of social interactions, we suggest that similar sources, i.e. historical child observations, could be used in creative ways for transnational investigations of children’s and adults’ everyday lives in early childhood institutions.