Tam2021a
| Tam2021a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | PHDTHESIS |
| Key | Tam2021a |
| Author(s) | Catherine L. Tam |
| Title | Young Children’s Methods for Exercising Agency in their Interactions with their Parents |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA |
| Publisher | University of the Witwatersrand |
| Year | 2021 |
| Language | English |
| City | Johannesburg |
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| URL | Link |
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Abstract
As children and parents go about their daily lives, they initiate, engage in and complete various tasks around the home; and in the process of completing these activities, they encounter the challenge of getting each other to do things. Prior EMCA research has primarily focused on how parents get children to do things through the investigation of parent-initiated request-sequences and parental pursuits of compliance through demands, threats and touch. While I also focus on request and demand sequences, I examine how children initiate and pursue a course of action to get their parents to do things, thereby identifying previously unexamined methods that children use to exercise agency and authority in interaction with their parents. I do so by adopting an ethnomethodologically-informed conversation-analytic approach to studying child-parent interaction that emphasises the need to study participant orientations to the developmental scheme and to avoid making a priori assumptions about asymmetries in competence, agency and authority. The data corpus consists of 9 hours of video-recordings of child-parent interactions spanning 13 days. Data were collected from two volunteer families with four-year-old children who recorded their daily lives using smart nanny cameras. In an examination of parent-initiated request-sequences, I look at how children initiate an alternative sequence of action by countering their parent’s requests. I identify two types of counters; one that children can use to challenge a proposed task’s roles and another that replaces a parental course of action with the child’s. I also analyse child-initiated demand-sequences and children’s methods for pursuing parental compliance. I then focus on a specific type of demand - the “look at X” demand - and parental responses to it. Through these investigations of children’s methods, I demonstrate that young children utilise the developmental scheme as a resource for designing their actions and managing their social positions. This study contributes to a growing body of knowledge on children’s methods for engaging with adults, managing their social positions (through deontic, epistemic and affective claims) and, thus, contributing to their own socialisation; while demonstrating the importance of avoiding a priori assumptions of authority in interactions between parents and children.
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