Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics

Abstract

In theorizing on family life, childrens agency is a feature of a modern type of family, marked by free choice and inter-generational negotiations rather than parental authority. A video ethnography of Swedish everyday family life documents directive sequences and inter-generational negotiations, including what is here called activity contracts: agreements that form a type of inter-generational account work around target activities (e.g. cleaning ones room). Within local family politics, contracts and revised contracts emerge as parts of such account work. The analyses focus on how contracts emerge within successive downgradings and upgradings of parental directives. Activity contracts regulate mutual rights and obligations, invoking family rule statements and local moral order, drawing on an array of verbal and nonverbal resources, ranging from parents mitigated requests and childrens time bargaining to nonverbal escape strategies and gentle shepherding

Handling power-asymmetry in interactions with infants

“…They are a linguistic means to constitute different forms of social power-asymmetry as well as solidarity in interactions (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011;Goodwin 2006). In parent-child interactions, different forms of mitigation such as reason-giving, explanation, terms of endearment, modal constructions, or tone of voice, laughter, kissing can soften degrees of coerciveness (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011;Goodwin 2006). Upgraded forms of directives such as repetition, increased volume of voice, threats or physical action, on the other hand, will stress coerciveness and power-asymmetry (ibid).…”

“…In lines 8-12 she provides an account (being not in the mood and being tired) for the missing response by the child which serves as an acceptable excuse. Moreover, she uses tag-questions which can be seen as mitigated forms of directives (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011).…”

“…Aronsson and colleagues (Aronsson & Gottzén 2011;Aronsson & Cekaite 2011) for instance, found that Swedish middle class families in every day interactions draw on communicative devices marked by negotiation and the child's self-regulation rather than coercion or unmitigated parental requests which they see as prototypical for a modern democratic family model.…”

“…This investigation draws on prior work on family-interactions, within the framework of language socialization and discursive psychology, that investigated parenting strategies that foster familial and cultural values such as autonomy, interdependence and responsibility and that draw on different forms of authoritativeness. Negotiating practices and egalitarian strategies were found for instance in middle class families in Los Angeles (Fasulo et al 2007;Sirota 2006) and Sweden (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011). Similarly, Hepburn & Potter (2011) analyzed the use of threats in British middle class family dinner interactions as a means of co-constructing social influence on children.…”

Directing and requesting: two interactive uses of the mental state terms want and need

“…I examine live interactional practices in which want and need regularly occur, specifically how speakers use I want to deliver directives and I need to build requests in specific, recurrent environments to manage a range of contingencies and considerations. The second concern will be to extend work that has reported on the selection of syntactic format when building requests and directives (Aronsson and Cekaite 2011;Craven and Potter 2010;Curl and Drew 2008;Heinemann 2006;Lindström 2005;Vinkhuyzen and Szymanski 2005). The analysis draws on recent discursive psychological work which examines "psychological" matters as they are described, invoked, and put to use by people themselves in situ as part of the social actions performed in and through everyday talk (e.g., see contributions in Hepburn and Wiggins 2007).…”