This article explores morality as situated activity and approaches the discursive practice of accountability in Italian family dinner conversations as an avenue for understanding the construction of moral behaviour in everyday interpersonal interaction. The article focuses in particular on vicarious accounts, namely accounts, or explanations, provided by parents for a child’s misbehaviour. It examines the multiple socializing functions that vicarious accounts accomplish and the different dimensions of responsibility that they mobilize. While scaffolding children’s participation in episodes of accountability, vicarious accounts set up constraints on children’s autonomy of action, neutralizing more subversive and blameworthy interpretations of their problematic conduct. In this sense, vicarious accounts are qualified concessions and are face-saving acts both for the child whose action was signalled as improper and for the parent who initially requested the account.
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