This paper reports on findings from an exploratory study on social media dilemmas (SMDs) mothers experience about their children’s social media presence when their mothers-in-law share about their offspring online, violating their boundaries expectations. The work is theoretically informed by systems theory and communication privacy management theory. A parenting forum was researched to investigate how mothers themselves frame these dilemmatic situations through a thematic analysis of a sample of 1224 posts from 38 discussion threads focusing on these issues. This work shows the disorienting nature of SMDs leading mothers to seek support through online communication. Findings from this study further suggest that sharing about minors on social media can cause dialectical tensions between interacting systems (i. e. the nuclear and the extended family), with mothers claiming and expecting first-level agency in managing their children’s digital footprints to foster systemic differentiation in the digital home.

Delivering and acknowledging assessments are the most recurrent institutional activities occurring in parent-teacher conference. This paper reports data from a mother-teacher conference concerning a gifted child. We show how participants’ practices to accomplish and receive assessment in the report-assessment phase of the event: (a) display their relative epistemic and deontic rights, (b) are oriented to participants’ institutional relevant identities, and (c) project or even enact different and quite opposite assessment trajectories. We contend that struggles in assessing the child display participants’ different stances: teachers’ ‘normalizing’ and ‘group oriented’ trajectory vs. the mother’s orientation toward ‘doctorability’ and pressure for individualized treatment. Although typically occurring between routine-case oriented institutions vs. idiosyncratic-case oriented clients, such a struggle displays also the ‘paradoxical injunctions’ that frame teachers’ everyday work: adopting a ‘group-oriented’ perspective while at the same time being accountable for an individualized approach.

L’article porte sur la question des devoirs à la maison à partir de l’analyse d’interactions entre des enfants fréquentant l’école primaire et leur mère, lors de la correction des devoirs. L’objectif est d’identifier les modes de communication et les pratiques récurrentes adoptés par les parents pour soutenir les enfants dans cette activité. La recherche, à caractère ethnographique, utilise l’analyse du discours à partir de transcriptions d’un corpus vidéo qui a permis l’identification des échanges à travers lesquels parents et enfants construisent la correction du devoir. La manière dont ces mères interagissent montre qu’elles connaissent la culture de l’école, les langages disciplinaires et ses artefacts et, donc, qu’elles semblent toutes correspondre à l’idée d’un parent institutionnellement compétent.