This essay entails a critical review of the origins, discourses and contemporary manifestations of NAEYC's enduring commitment to 'developmentally appropriate practice' (DAP); and proposes a reconceptualisation of DAP as an open question and incentive for place-based collaborative inquiry. Brief discussion of ECE's early history highlights transnational feminist exchanges, charitable activism, competing interpretations of early childhood programme goals and pedagogies; and a mutually-beneficial relationship between two emerging fields -- child development research and ECE as a scientifically-based profession. Decades of child development research are described in relation to evolving iterations of "DAP Guidelines" (1987). Discourse analysis posits DAP as a weapon against push-down academics, and a hubristic code signifying professional sanction and membership. Challenges to DAP hegemony include research on the cultural embeddedness of developmental standards and examples of collaborative place-based inquiry into 'appropriate' ways to care for and educate young children. The essay concludes by proposing DAP as a dynamic heuristic in the reform of ECE teacher education as a profession committed to multiple sources of knowledge and equity-focused social action on behalf of actual and imagined childhoods.