The globalisation of early childhood education and care (ECEC) has resulted in increased scrutiny of ECEC services, including pedagogical approaches and how best to prepare the ECEC workforce. Child-centred practice has come to epitomise ECEC pedagogy, but questions remain as to what is child-centred and how a member of the workforce becomes child-centred. Hungary represents a particular reading of child-centred practice, based on a construct of a child-loving adult. Questionnaire data illustrates support amongst Hungarian pedagogues for the importance of love in ECEC in support of a relational approach to working with children. However, observation and interview data from students indicates that the child-loving, child-centred ideal is both a weakly classified construct and that training and assessment practices create contradictory messages as to its meaning amongst students. The study has implications for how ECEC pedagogical ideals area realised in initial training and interpretations of child-centred practice.