Abstract
Drawing on naturally occurring, multiparty interactional data involving parents, children, and third parties (e.g. friends and relatives), this conversation analytic study investigates how the status of ‘parent’ is co-constructed on a moment-by-moment basis in the course of everyday interaction. The analysis focuses on participant orientation to parents’ rights to act on behalf of their children and third parties, through which parental entitlements, responsibilities, and authority are invoked. Specifically, interaction participants orient to parents as having primary rights to know about their children, determine their courses of action, and take primary responsibilities for their behaviors. Parents also confirm and ratify these category ascriptions by acting on behalf of their children and third parties, demonstrating with actions that they are capable of carrying out their rights and responsibilities as parents. The findings shed light on how the practical relevance of the ‘parent’ membership shapes the sequential unfolding of multiparty interaction.
Introduction
The status of being a parent is normally determined by a natural relationship with the child, yet how such status is understood is a structural and cultural component of society. In modern societies, parenthood has developed into an obligation directed at safeguarding children’s best interests and promoting their well-being (Schneider, 2010). This child-centered construction of parenthood has informed the legal position of parents vis-à-vis their children. Although the formulation of parental rights and obligations is ever-changing in legislation, its scope is generally concerned with the care and upbringing of children, ensuring their rights to food and shelter, education, and healthcare, and representing them in legal proceedings (Churchill, 2011). It is through fulfilling these responsibilities that parents are constructed as parents in these societies.
The social construction of parenthood is not limited to legal rights and obligations. Previous discourse studies have demonstrated that parenthood as a moral domain is constructed in everyday life through language use. For instance, drawing on sociolinguistic interviews, Schiffrin (1996) analyzed how two women create self-portraits as mothers through narratives about their daughters. Gordon (2007) examined spontaneous family interactional data and showed how a speaker takes the maternal role by performing actions associated with motherhood, such as assessing her child’s behaviors. Since this strand of research has mainly focused on how speakers construct their own identities, it remains underexplored how parenthood is co-constructed through participant orientation on a moment-by-moment basis in the course of ordinary interaction. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how parents are treated as parents by other interaction participants in everyday life.
Taking a conversation analytic approach, this study examines how interaction participants orient to ‘parent’ as a membership category. In social interaction, participants’ conduct is routinely organized by reference to categories of which they are members (Housley and Fitzgerald, 2015; Sacks, 1992). Through common-sense knowledge and assumptions of membership categories, including rights and responsibilities associated with such categories, participants account for and make sense of the social actions of one another (Pomerantz and Mandelbaum, 2005). This study focuses on the rights and responsibilities pertaining to the ‘parent’ category. In what follows, I review prior work on parenthood in the interactional context. After a description of the data and method used in this study, I examine the structural context in which parental rights and responsibilities are invoked, exercised, and sustained in multiparty interactions involving parents, children, and third-party participants (i.e. participants in addition to the focal parent and the focal child, such as family friends and grandparents). The analysis shows that the ‘parent’ category affords particular rights for parents to legitimately act on behalf of their children and third parties. I argue that participant orientation to such parental rights constitutes one way through which parenthood is co-constructed in social interaction.
‘Parent’ as a membership category
The interactional construction of parenthood concerns not the isolated qualities of parents but rather their conduct in relation to their children (Enfield, 2011). In his seminal work on membership categorization analysis, Sacks (1972) introduced the brief story ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’ and argued that ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’ comprise a standardized relational pair whose expectable actions and legitimate attributions in relation to one another allow us to understand the story – the mommy is the mommy of this baby, and her action of picking up this baby is responsive to the baby’s crying. This example not only illustrates how membership categories are operated in the organization of ordinary interaction in general but also points to a norm-guided understanding of the membership rights and responsibilities bound to ‘parent’ as a category – the mommy has the right and responsibility to comfort her baby when the baby is crying; other adults do not share the same right or responsibility. It is through picking up the baby that the mother’s membership as a ‘parent’ is made visible and confirmed. When she does so, it is recognizable as a mundane action, and people do not need to look any further to make sense of this action.
Subsequent research on membership categorization has empirically investigated how ‘parent’ is made demonstrably relevant (Schegloff, 1987) through explicit references to people as members of the ‘parent’ category, such as using ‘a mother’ rather than ‘Mrs. Martin’ to refer to a person (Schegloff, 2007a), and how that category can be used as resources for action design. For instance, Stokoe (2009) showed how a speaker, by self-referencing as ‘a single mother’, alludes to her lack of resources to cope with problems. Drawing on a phone call with a doctor, Pomerantz and Mandelbaum (2005) analyzed how the caller invoked shared understandings of parental rights and responsibilities by identifying herself as ‘only his grandma’ to account for why she had not requested a medical examination on the sick child’s behalf – parents have the right and responsibility to do so, but grandparents normally do not (see also Kitzinger, 2005).
While investigations of membership categorization have developed a predominant focus on explicit references to categories, membership categories can be deployed in the service of social actions without being explicitly invoked. That is, membership categories inhabited by participants may afford or constrain their rights to legitimately perform certain actions (Rossi and Stivers, 2021). In their analysis of a meal shared by a young child and his family members, Butler and Fitzgerald (2010) showed how interlocutors tacitly invoke ‘parent’ through certain actions, such as asking the parent ‘Do you want a separate plate for [child]?’. By selecting the parent rather than the child to provide a response, the questioner makes relevant the parent’s right and responsibility to make this decision for their child.
Another common example of conversational actions tied to the ‘parent’ category is directives (Labov and Fanshel, 1977). Previous studies on parental directives have demonstrated the shared orientation to parents’ rights to control their children’s behaviors in parent-child interaction (Aronsson and Cekaite, 2011; Ervin-Tripp, 1976; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018; Kent, 2012). Although children do not necessarily comply with parental directives, it is by virtue of parental rights that parents have a license to issue directives in the first place and sanction their children’s non-compliance. Individuals without membership in the ‘parent’ category do not share the same rights to perform these actions and would be accountable if they did so. For example, Hester and Hester (2010) documented a case in which a child issues a directive to his sibling, and this action is understood as a repeat of their parent’s directive rather than an independent action since directives are not conventionally bound to the ‘sibling’ category.
This line of research on parent-child interaction, while depicting children’s position in the asymmetrical parent-child relationship (see also Butler and Wilkinson, 2013; Enfield, 2011; Forrester, 2010; Liu, 2023; O’Reilly, 2006; Sacks, 1992), has left underexplored participant orientation to such asymmetry in multiparty interactions. More importantly, the few studies that have addressed the ‘parent’ category in multiparty interaction are mainly based on case studies of single episodes of interaction. The present study extends the scope of current research by systematically examining the intersection of sequential actions and membership categories across various cases and building a body of empirical evidence of how the ‘parent’ category affords rights for its members to act on behalf of others in multiparty interactions involving their children. The findings elucidate how the status of being a parent is co-constructed through the actions of parents, children, and third parties.
Data and method
This study draws on a dataset consisting of 33 hours of naturally occurring parent-child interactions from eight families with at least one child under the age of 6 years. The interactions were video-recorded when the families were engaged in everyday activities at home. Most data are multiparty interactions involving more than two family members, and on some occasions, other adults (e.g. friends and relatives) also participated. Dyadic interactions are excluded for the purpose of this study. All data were collected with participants’ written informed consent. For child participants, their legal guardians’ informed consent was obtained.
Among the eight families, four resided in the US and were either monolingual English-speaking or bilingual English/Mandarin-speaking. The other four families resided in Taiwan and were all monolingual Mandarin-speaking. Prior cross-cultural research on parenting styles suggests that Taiwanese parents, under the influence of Confucianism, are more likely than their US counterparts to adopt an authoritarian parenting style (Chao, 1994). I initially examined the data to look for possible cultural differences regarding the construction of parenthood. However, the analysis reveals no difference between the data collected in the US and that collected in Taiwan with respect to the focal phenomenon. For this reason, the data are presented together as a single set.
The present study utilizes conversation analysis (CA), a methodological approach that grounds the analysis on participant orientation to social categories as well as other indications of social status rather than imposing the researcher’s own view (Sidnell and Stivers, 2013). The video data were transcribed according to standard CA transcription conventions (Hepburn and Bolden, 2013). For Mandarin data, three-line transcripts including transliterations, linguistic glosses, and idiomatic English translations are presented. The age of the child participant is listed in years and months in the extract headers of all transcripts.
Guided by the CA principles, I relied on systematic case-by-case analyses of sequences to look for patterns of how the practical relevance of the ‘parent’ membership shapes the sequential unfolding of interaction. Initial observations allowed me to restrict my collection to one particular type of interactional right that indexes the special status of parents – the right to act on behalf of others. After identifying cases in which parents are treated as having the right to act on behalf of others, including their children and third parties, I conducted sequential analyses of these cases to examine participant orientation to parental rights and responsibilities in situ.
Acting on behalf of others
In ordinary adult interaction, participants are evidently entitled to know their own thoughts and to communicate them on their own behalf (Heritage, 2011; Labov and Fanshel, 1977; Lerner, 1996; Pomerantz, 1980; Sacks, 1992). This ‘act on one’s own behalf’ norm can be seen as part of what Goffman (1955) called “traffic rules of social interaction” (p. 216) – it reflects a tacit agreement between participants to assert their prerogative to make their own contributions in interaction while refraining from treading into others’ territorial preserves, including personal knowledge of oneself, over which people claim primary rights to possess, control, and use (Goffman, 1971). For instance, in question-answer sequences, non-selected recipients typically withhold their participation at the transition relevance place (Sacks et al., 1974) even when they are otherwise able to answer the question; only under certain interactional contexts are non-selected recipients treated as having the rights to take the next turn, such as the selected speaker fails to produce an immediate response or displays an inability to answer (Antaki and Chinn, 2019; Lerner, 2019; Pino and Land, 2022; Stivers, 2001; Stivers and Robinson, 2006). This norm, however, is often relaxed for parents in multiparty interactions when their children are present. As the following analysis reveals, participants consistently orient parents as having the right to act on behalf of their children and third parties (i.e. other interaction participants in addition to the focal parent and the focal child), and parents confirm such category ascriptions by doing so.
Acting on behalf of children
Parents’ rights to act on behalf of their children can be justified by their deontic rights, that is, the right to make decisions for their children and control the course of their future actions (Kent, 2012; Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012). For instance, Extract 1 shows how a third party orients to the parent’s deontic right over the child. This segment takes place when Dad is opening a pizza box at lunch. As Zoey draws her attention to the pizza left in the box (line 1), Dad offers her a slice (line 2). While Dad’s selection of the next speaker grants Zoey the primary right to accept or decline his offer, Mom immediately declines the offer on Zoey’s behalf (line 3).
Extract (1) Zoey: 4y9m
In response to Dad’s offer, Mom produces an immediate ‘no’ and rushes through an account for her rejection, which works to preempt an acceptance from Zoey (Lerner, 2019). Her action of bypassing the selected recipient without an apparent warrant for intervening (e.g. lack of response from Zoey) indexes her deontic authority over Zoey (Antaki and Chinn, 2019; Pino and Land, 2022; Stivers and Robinson, 2006).
Both Zoey and Dad align with Mom’s asserted deontic right to decline the offer on Zoey’s behalf. Rather than competing for the floor to speak, Zoey withholds her response until Mom appears to have trouble finishing her turn (line 3), and only after a significant gap does Zoey attempt to move the sequence forward by co-completing the account for rejection (line 5). Dad also aligns with Mom’s right to decline the offer by treating the rejection as valid and not giving Zoey pizza. Even though Zoey (as the selected recipient of the offer) and Dad (as Zoey’s other parent) could push back on Mom’s rejection, Mom’s membership as Zoey’s parent provides a warrant for producing this immediate rejection even to another parent.
It is worth noting that, since ‘parent’ and ‘child’ are a standardized relational pair, the rights and responsibilities pertaining to parenthood and childhood are interrelated – Mom’s special right to decline the offer on Zoey’s behalf and Zoey’s restricted right to determine her own course of action are two sides of the same coin. The goal of this study, however, is not to examine children’s position in the asymmetrical parent-child relationship but rather how such asymmetry is operated in multiparty interaction. Therefore, although children’s restricted rights are visible and consequential in this and the following data extracts, this analysis focuses on participant orientation to parental rights and entitlements instead of further explicating children’s restricted status.
The next case exemplifies a more explicit orientation to parents’ rights to act on behalf of their children. In Extract 2, which also takes place during lunch, Grandma (GMA) selects Mom to grant or deny an offer to Riley even though Riley is sitting right next to Mom and is available to respond.
Extract (2) Riley: 2y9m
Through her gaze and the third-person reference to Riley, Grandma’s selection of Mom as the next speaker indicates her orientation to Mom’s deontic right to determine whether or not Riley might have the mushroom. Even though the ‘parent’ category is not explicitly invoked in the conversation, the practice of speaker selection and turn design highlights the situated practical relevance of parental rights and responsibilities in the organization of social action.
While selecting parents to make decisions for their children as an indication of participant orientation to parents’ deontic rights has been documented in prior research on family interaction (Butler and Fitzgerald, 2010), there is an additional layer to the design of Grandma’s offer in this segment – she uses an inquiry about epistemic status as a vehicle for orienting to Mom’s deontic right. In interaction, parents are normally treated as possessing rights and obligations to know, describe, and assess their children by virtue of their membership in the ‘parent’ category (Enfield, 2011; Liu, 2023; Raymond and Heritage, 2006). The design of Grandma’s offer presupposes that Mom has direct access to Riley’s wants (‘does Riley want the mushroom?’) and therefore has the primary right to make the decision on behalf of Riley. In other words, Grandma’s offer is designed as if Riley is not in a primary position to know her own wants, to make a sensible decision, or to communicate it reliably and effectively, whereas Mom has greater rights and responsibilities in any or all of these aspects. However, Mom appears to undermine Grandma’s project by asking Grandma to redirect the question to Riley, highlighting Riley’s epistemic autonomy (line 3).
In Extract 3, the third party selects the parents to confirm a child’s claim about her own preference, and the parents assert their epistemic rights by confirming the claim. Before this segment, Dad asks Ran about her least favorite food, to which Ran replies malingshu ‘potatoes’ (data not presented). After the sequence is closed, Mom turns to Ran’s younger sibling Jia and asks the same question (‘What is your least favorite food?’ in line 1). When Jia appears to hesitate, Dad provides an answer in an extremely low volume as if he is talking to himself (line 3). Jia overlaps with Dad and claims that she does not like potatoes (line 4), which is identical to Ran’s earlier answer. Later, Mom’s friend (FRI) selects the parents and requests confirmation of Jia’s claim (line 12).
Extract (3) Jia: 2y9m; Ran: 6y2m
Although Mom and Dad have knowledge of their children’s likes and dislikes through observing their past behaviors, this is an indirect form of access to their preferences. In this sequence, however, both parents assert primary epistemic rights over their children’s preferences: Mom and Dad’s inquiries about food preference can be identified as what Antaki (2013) called ‘recipient-side test questions’, that is, questions that appear to be designed to genuinely solicit information within the recipient’s domain of knowledge, yet the answers to which are assessed by the questioner as being right or wrong (see Liu, 2023). This is evident in Dad’s action in line 3 – he takes the initiative to articulate Jia’s view, though the low volume suggests that he defers to Jia’s primary right to answer as the selected speaker. In addition, when Ran asserts her knowledge about Jia’s preference (line 6), her claim is immediately disputed by Mom, who unequivocally asserts her primary epistemic rights over both of her children (lines 7–8).
The friend displays a similar orientation to the parents’ primary epistemic rights over their children. The friend has no access to Jia’s food preference and appears not to notice Dad’s utterance in line 3 since she sits further away from Dad. However, she initiates a request for confirmation that challenges Jia’s asserted claim (line 12), in which her use of zhende ‘really’ implies disbelief, and ye ‘also’ provides a built-in account for her disbelief (that Jia is repeating Ran’s answer, as the friend later explicitly states in line 15). Although the friend’s gaze cannot be identified in the video, her use of the third-person reference ta ‘she’ excludes Jia as the selected speaker even though Jia is the one who made the claim, has direct access to her own preferences, and is available to respond. In so doing, the friend treats the parents as having greater rights and responsibilities to know Jia’s preferences and discuss them. The parents then confirm the friend’s suspicion (lines 13–14, 16–17), reaffirming their epistemic rights over Jia’s claim.
In addition to question-answer sequences, assessment sequences are another environment where participant orientation to parenthood is often made recognizably relevant. Pillet-Shore (2012) examined parent-teacher conferences and argued that both teachers and parents treat utterances that praise non-present children as implicating praise of parents since parents are responsible for their children. As the following case shows, the ‘ownership’ of children (Raymond and Heritage, 2006) can be invoked and claimed even in the presence of children. In Extract 4, Mom and Lei are playing a car logo game: Mom draws a car logo on a whiteboard, and Lei answers what brand it is. The game has been going on for a few rounds, and Lei has correctly identified all the logos Mom has drawn so far. The extract begins as Lei again correctly identifies the logo of Volkswagen. In line 3, Mom’s friend (FRI) selects Mom and compliments Lei’s performance.
Extract (4) Lei: 2y2m
After Mom closes the sequence of Volkswagen (line 9), the friend also addresses her compliment directly to Lei, thereby validating his status as an interaction participant. However, the friend’s
prioritization of addressing Mom over Lei conveys her orientation to Mom’s primary right to take compliments about Lei’s behaviors. That is, instead of treating Lei as an autonomous individual whose accomplishments are exclusively his to own, the friend attributes Lei’s praiseworthy conduct primarily to Mom and subsequently to Lei. As the recipient, Mom aligns with this orientation by producing a minimal agreement (line 4), which works to display a sensitivity to both the preference to agree with and accept the praising assessment and the preference to avoid self-praise (Pomerantz, 1978).
In this section, I have analyzed how the ‘parent’ membership affords rights for parents to act on behalf of their children. Parents not only take the initiative to act on behalf of their children (e.g. rejecting an offer made to the child in Extract 1) but are consistently selected to perform these actions (Extracts 2–4). These selections suggest that interaction participants orient to parents as having primary rights to know about their children, determine their courses of action, and take primary responsibilities for their behaviors. Parents also confirm and ratify these category ascriptions and demonstrate with actions (i.e. act on behalf of their children) that they are capable of carrying out their entitlements and responsibilities as parents.
Acting on behalf of third-party interlocutors
In this section, we turn to a related but different phenomenon – participant orientation to the parent’s right to act on behalf of a third-party participant when the child is present. While parents’ rights to act on behalf of their children can be accounted for by their deontic rights, epistemic rights, and more broadly, ownership of their children, the same cannot be claimed with respect to third parties. Nonetheless, in multiparty interactions involving their children, parents are often treated as having the right to act on behalf of third parties even when third parties are otherwise able to act for themselves. This typically happens when an interactional issue emerges, such as the child producing a problematic or even norm-violating action in relation to the third party, and the parent works to deal with it. In this regard, the parent serves as the mediator between their child and the third party, and treading into the third party’s territorial preserve (Goffman, 1971) is contingent upon this goal.
There are two types of cases in this subset of data. First, in some cases, parents self-select to respond to their children’s initiating actions on behalf of third parties even when they have no right of access to third parties’ territorial preserves. Their actions, however, are not treated as an accountable matter. Extract 5 exemplifies how a parent dismisses her child’s invitation and makes a promise on behalf of her friend. The sequence begins as Katie selects Mom’s friend (FRI) and asks whether she will stay for dinner with the family. Although an invitation is implicated in Katie’s inquiry, the friend does not treat Katie as having the primary right to invite her for dinner and withholds her response until Mom issues the invitation (line 3).
Extract (5) Katie: 3y5m
The friend initially provides an uncertainty-marked rejection (line 5) but then produces a firm no following Mom’s request for confirmation (line 7). Mom acknowledges the rejection (line 8), and the sequence appears to move toward closure. However, Katie reopens the sequence by renewing the invitation (line 10), which, given her lack of primary right to invite the friend, can also be understood as a complaint or a plea in response to the friend’s prior rejection. The friend as the addressee has the primary right and obligation to respond to Katie’s renewed invitation, yet Mom immediately dismisses the invitation by offering an alternative on behalf of the friend even though she has neither the access to whether the friend plans to visit again nor the right to control her future courses of action. In so doing, Mom prevents the friend from reproducing a dispreferred rejection. The friend also orients to Mom’s right to manage the invitation by aligning with Mom’s promise (line 12). In this case, Mom’s action is warranted by her interactional goal of dealing with Katie’s unwanted invitation and advancing the sequence progressivity.
The following case provides further evidence that parents’ rights to act on behalf of third parties are not warranted by their knowledge of or experience with third parties but rather by their primary responsibilities as parents to handle interactional issues related to their children. Extract 6 below shows how the parents respond to their child’s proposal on behalf of the researcher (RES) who visits the family for a recording session for the first time. This segment takes place during Lei’s breakfast time, and the sequence begins as he selects the researcher, to whom he refers as ‘teacher’, and produces a proposal gen wo da da ‘hit hit with me’ (line 1). Lei’s proposal poses two problems for the researcher: First, although it can be inferred as some kind of play, da da ‘hit hit’ is not a fixed expression in Mandarin. The researcher may thus have trouble assessing whether she would join Lei for this unknown activity. Second, accepting the proposal entails engaging Lei in a different activity before he finishes his breakfast, and the researcher apparently does not have the deontic right to grant or deny permission for Lei’s proposal of an alternative course of action.
Extract (6) Lei: 2y2m
In ordinary adult conversation, when a response is relevantly missing, it is the norm for the action initiator to deal with the problem (Pomerantz, 1984). In this case, however, the parents’ action of moving the sequence forward can be accounted for by a number of reasons. As Lei’s parents, they obviously know what ‘hit hit’ refers to as well as the fact that this is not a fixed expression outside the family. In addition, Lei is unlikely aware of the understanding issue that ‘hit hit’ might induce since he presumably has been using this expression in interactions with family members without raising any problem. Finally, and maybe most importantly, the parents have the deontic rights to grant or deny permission to allow Lei to engage in another activity at breakfast time.
After a gap, Dad accepts the proposal on behalf of the researcher (line 3). Even though he has no access to whether the researcher is interested in this activity, he works to facilitate sequence progressivity by granting conditional permission. Mom then overlaps with Dad and takes a different approach (line 4). While she also speaks on behalf of the researcher, she attributes the researcher’s lack of response to a hearing problem and requests Lei to repeat this proposal. That is, rather than fixing the interactional issue for the researcher, Mom prioritizes Lei’s right to a response from the selected recipient. After Lei reproduces the proposal in the same manner (line 6), the researcher utilizes Dad’s earlier response as a model and provides a conditional acceptance (line 7). Even though the parents do not seem to have the right to act on behalf of the researcher in terms of whether she heard Lei and whether she would like to play with him, they nonetheless use this as a resource to manage the interactional issue and move the sequence forward. The researcher also aligns with the parents, yielding to their primary rights and responsibilities to fix the issue that comes with Lei’s proposal.
Thus far, we have examined cases in which children initiate actions to which third parties ought to respond, yet parents act on behalf of third parties to deal with their children’s dispreferred or problematic initiating actions. Participants in interactions with children are shown to prioritize the need to handle interactional issues at the moment and advance sequence progressivity. This provides a justification for parents, who take primary responsibilities for their children, to tread into third parties’ territorial preserves and accomplish the situated actions of responding on their behalf.
The second set of cases identified in this subset of data concerns greater interactional issues – departures from interactional norms. When children violate interactional norms in multiparty interaction, parents consistently volunteer to sanction their transgressions, and third parties defer to parents’ primary rights to do so. Extract 7 happens when Zoey’s family members are taking their seats at the dinner table. Having noticed that Zoey was playing a child-learning game called ‘Olivia’, Grandma (GMA) selects Zoey and asks how she likes the game (line 1). Zoey does not respond, thus breaching the normative preference for selected speakers to take the next turn (Sacks et al., 1974). According to adult conversational norms, Grandma as the questioner would have the primary right to deal with Zoey’s non-response, either pursuing a response or abandoning her attempt to obtain a response (Heritage, 1984; Pomerantz, 1984). However, Dad self-selects and pursues a response from Zoey (line 3).
Extract (7) Zoey: 4y2m
Among the family members around the dinner table, Zoey is the only response-relevant recipient who has played ‘Olivia’ (Lerner, 2003). Other family members have no epistemic rights to answer the question on behalf of Zoey and are under no obligation to inform Grandma of the requested information when Zoey does not do so. By pursuing a response from Zoey, Dad asserts his right and responsibility as Zoey’s parent to socialize her into the interactional norm and sanction her deviation. Specifically, when Zoey provides minimal uptake without looking at Grandma or Dad (line 4), even though the right to assess the response is normally reserved for the questioner (Pomerantz, 1984), Dad treats Zoey’s answer as insufficient and probes more details by offering an account (“Ama bought th
In Extract 8, we see a more elaborate illustration of how a third party defers to the parent’s primary right to sanction her child and thereby socialize the child into the norm of answering questions. Brandon is sitting with Dad and Aunt at the dinner table, whereas Mom is sitting at another table with Brandon’s big brother, a short distance away, which allows them to hear but not see each other. Dad knows that a family friend, Shirley, visited that morning when Mom, Aunt, and Brandon were home, but he does not know for sure whether Brandon got to meet Shirley during her visit. This extract begins as Dad asks Brandon whether he met Shirley that day (line 1). Brandon immediately provides a factually incorrect answer (line 2), which requires correction. Although Aunt as a knowing co-participant has the epistemic right and ability to correct Brandon’s false claim, she defers to Mom’s primary right to sanction Brandon’s problematic claim by withholding her correction until Mom intervenes (lines 6–7).
Extract (8) Brandon: 2y10m
While Aunt and Mom are both in the knowing position of the requested information, their interactional roles are notably different: Aunt is a co-present participant who is sitting with Brandon and Dad, whereas Mom, who is engaging in another activity with Brandon’s big brother at a short distance, would not be considered as part of the ongoing conversation unless she self-selects to intervene. In this regard, Aunt would seem to have greater accountability to correct Brandon’s false claim. However, even though Aunt’s laughter (line 4) implies that she hears Brandon’s false claim and Dad’s acknowledgment as problematic, she withholds verbal participation until Mom produces a correction (line 6). Aunt’s (non)action points to an orientation to Mom’s membership in the ‘parent’ category, treating her as having the primary right and responsibility to correct her child even when she is not immediately present. After Mom corrects Brandon’s false claim, Aunt immediately produces a verbal correction, orienting to her own accountability as a knowing co-participant (line 7).
This section demonstrates the hierarchical order of parents and other adults in interactions with children – third parties yield to parents’ primary rights and responsibilities to manage interactional issues concerning their children. Even when the local interactional roles of third parties would otherwise grant them the right to sanction children’s violations of norms, parents are nonetheless treated as having the primary right to do so.
Discussion
The interactional construction of parenthood is not universally prescribed but rather a cultural component of a given society. As Sacks (1992) argued, culture as an apparatus for generating recognizable actions allows us to make sense of the membership in the ‘parent’ category and its category-bound activities. For instance, Schieffelin observed that in Kaluli society, babies are described as having no understanding, and thus Kaluli parents do not talk to their babies in dyadic interactions (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984). This is in contrast with the well-established baby talk register in Western societies (Snow, 1972). In the present study, we have examined how the ‘parent’ status provides for situated rights and responsibilities to act on behalf of others in multiparty interaction. Parents are not prescribed to act on behalf of others, yet they are treated as legitimate in doing so, and such participant orientation constitutes one way through which parenthood is co-constructed in the Taiwanese and American societies from which the data are drawn.
This study focuses on parental rights and responsibilities to act on behalf of others as a manifestation of the ‘parent’ category in everyday interaction. The first part of the analysis addresses the asymmetry between parents and their children – parents are considered to ‘own’ their children (Raymond and Heritage, 2006), whereas children are not always treated as autonomous individuals who take primary rights and responsibilities for their own thoughts, decisions, and behaviors. This study contributes to investigations of parent-child interaction by showing how the asymmetry between parents and their children is operated in multiparty interactions involving third-party participants, that is, how interaction participants orient to the entitlements and responsibilities of parents, and how parents confirm their status through observable actions.
The second part of the analysis provides insight into the hierarchical status of parents and other adults in terms of their rights and responsibilities in relation to children. As noted above, children’s ‘less-than-full’ membership status (Forrester, 2010) has been shown to shape their interactions with fuller members, including their parents and other adults. However, parenthood is rarely conceptualized vis-à-vis adulthood in prior discourse studies. This study illustrates how interaction participants display differential orientations to parents and other adults as separate categories. In particular, the distinction lies not only in how adults treat children (whether an adult has the right to act on behalf of a child) but also in how they treat one another (whether an adult has the right to act on behalf of another adult).
The findings also contribute to CA investigations of how children are socialized into conversational norms in the turn-by-turn sequential unfolding of everyday family interaction (e.g. Filipi, 2009; Keel, 2016; Liu, 2022). Specifically, the analysis shows how parents as the agent of primary socialization work to deal with children’s problematic and/or norm-violating actions, and more importantly, their primary rights and responsibilities in doing so. The strongest evidence lies in Extracts 7 and 8, where the third parties, as the focal children’s grandparent and aunt respectively, also bear rights and responsibilities in guiding the children and sanctioning their violations of interactional norms, yet they cede their rights to parents to socialize children into what is deemed adequate in interaction. It is worth noting that all parents in the current dataset are the primary caregivers of their children, and thus their ‘source-based authority’ by virtue of their actual experience with children and ‘status-based authority’ by virtue of their status as parents (Enfield, 2011) are aligned. In cases where these two types of authority are mismatched (e.g. the parent spends less time with the child than the grandparent does), participant orientation may differ from the findings of the present study.
The practice of acting on behalf of others has been examined in both ordinary (Lerner, 2019; Stivers and Robinson, 2006) and institutional settings, in particular in medical encounters, as it indexes participants’ rights, entitlements, and authority in the triadic physician-patient-companion relationship (Antaki and Chinn, 2019; Fioramonte and Vásquez, 2019; Pino and Land, 2022; Stivers, 2001). This study adds to prior findings by documenting how this practice is deployed to invoke memberships and relationships in multiparty interaction involving parents, children, and third parties. In addition, given that most studies focused on responding to information-seeking questions, which mainly concern epistemic considerations in interaction, this study draws on various types of sequences (i.e. offer in Extracts 1 and 2, assessment in Extract 4, invitation in Extract 5, and proposal in Extract 6) and yield insight into the multiple aspects of parental rights and authority.
A broader implication of this study centers around the intersection of sequential action and membership categorization, the two fundamental domains of social interaction. CA investigations of membership categories, as previously discussed, have predominantly relied on explicit references to categories as evidence in support of claims of categorical relevance (Stokoe, 2012). However, as Schegloff (2007b) pointed out, investigations of the membership category should deal not only with already formulated descriptions of persons and activities but also with how the conduct itself comes to be formulated as such. This study shows how the ‘parent’ category is made relevant in the moment-by-moment flow of interaction without being explicitly mentioned – participants’ shared understanding and practical knowledge of ‘parent’ allows parents to legitimately act on behalf of others. The findings resonate with Rossi and Stivers’ (2020) argument that through systematic examinations of actions whose performance is governed by social norms associated with memberships in a certain category, CA research can contribute to our understanding of the mechanism through which social identity permeates social interaction.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the J. Yang and Family Centennial Scholarship and the Taiwan Studies Lectureship Graduate Fellowship, both awarded through UCLA Asia Pacific Center.