Abstract This article is based on a 2-year (2017–2019) project that aimed to find out in what ways and with what materials childcare settings can bring “raising for a sustainable society” into a lived practice and what kind of support they need to accomplish that. The project mainly consisted of an action research in two day-care centres for children younger than three in Flanders who worked on implementing “education for sustainable development”. In this way, we hoped not only to find out what actions help to implement sustainability but also what structural changes are needed for a successful implementation. After discussions with stakeholders, the research team decided to use SDG’s (sustainable development goals) as a framework for the project. This enabled a recognisable structure as well as a broad interpretation of sustainability, which would allow for a wide range of implementation actions. During the action research, it appeared to be difficult to come to an implementation, as practitioners experience a lot of barriers in working on sustainability. In this article, we discuss in what ways the SDG framework provided a stepstone to overcome barriers to work on sustainability and in what ways the framework did not serve this purpose or even created new barriers. In general, the SDG framework proves to be a good way to get acquainted with the complexity of sustainability and to work on a shared vision but it does not suffice to work on daily attitudes or embodied pedagogical practices. Such a goal would need the backup of other actions.