The textbook for childhood educators introduces fundamental social science models that reflect the complexity and heterogeneity of children's living environments. It aims to foster an understanding of culturally and socially differentiated contexts of growing up in modern societies. In addition to discussing social order models, structured living environments are the focus. It becomes clear that childhood education must reflect these differentiated and contradictory worlds of children in order to consider them in practice. Therefore, current challenges for educational processes arising from differentiations and intensification processes of social development are discussed in depth.