In the Nordic countries, policies for children, who require special educational assistance, emphasize that support should be provided within regular preschool settings. As one measure to facilitate these children's participation in preschool activities, support teachers may be appointed. The present study explores how support teachers contribute to these children's interaction with peers. Fieldwork was carried out in three Norwegian preschools that focused on children aged from 1 to 3 years who required special educational assistance. The analyses revealed that support teachers regularly intervened in the children's activities and took action in various ways in order to facilitate children's interactions with peers. From the analyses, support teachers' approaches could be categorized, respectively, as child centred or group based. A child-centred orientation was found to be more likely to constrain peer interactions than a more group-based orientation which had less specific focus on the individual child. In this paper, two episodes from the research data representing these two international patterns are analysed and discussed. Support teachers may be more effective in enhancing peer interactions for children requiring special educational assistance if they become more aware of how their actions may constrain rather than facilitate interactions.