This article examines how five teacher candidates conceptualized meanings of teaching and childhood through discussions of childhood objects within a focus group. Drawing on psychosocial methods, we show how teachers used their objects to work through tensions between professional roles as educators and the return of personal memory. We highlight the ways in which meanings of teaching and childhood were affected by the shifting dynamics of compliance, anxiety, and conflict within the group. Through our analysis, we illustrate the value of using objects to support emerging teachers' engagements in complicated conversations within a divergent community to represent conflictive meanings of childhood and education.