Framed by the sociology of childhood and Foucauldian-inspired perspectives, this article is focused on parents' experiences of parent-professional encounters in diagnostic processes of young children enrolled in Norwegian early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions or schools. Based on qualitative interviews with parents, we explore how they participate and manoeuvre in encounters with professionals during processes in which their children were constructed as different in a space of normality and deviance, while also bringing their own understandings of their children to the fore. From our analysis, it appears that parents manoeuvre between complying with and adapting to, as well as negotiating and resisting the constructions put forward by the professionals. (author abstract)