Deontics at bedtime

Abstract

Directive trajectories are common in parent–child talk as parents attempt to engage their children in household activities. Previous research on families with autistic children has reported that parents have difficulty engaging their children in household activities. The current study analyses the strategies a parent utilizes in negotiating an activity contract with their autistic child. The analyses show that the parent negotiates stances towards autonomy, category-membership-tied activities and social obligations, as well as used embodied conduct. The analyses also show how the child is sensitive to these strategies and actively participates in the directive trajectory. The findings show that both parent and child are active co-constructors of the social relationship in directive trajectories and that the child can strategically counter the variety of directive resources the parent uses.

Conversation analysis and power: examining the descendants and antecedents of social action

“…Although rights to determine action are an omnirelevant aspect of social interaction, deontic authority has been specifically investigated in the contexts of specific activities and interactional phenomena. These include directive instruction (Henderson, 2020 ; Frick and Palola, 2022 ), support work (Antaki and Webb, 2019 ), joint decision making (Stevanovic, 2012 ), participatory democracy (Magnusson, 2020 ; Wåhlin-Jacobsen and Abildgaard, 2020 ), leadership (Clifton et al, 2018 ; Van De Mieroop, 2020 ), agenda management (Stephenson, 2020 ), and teaching development (Ripatti-Torniainen and Stevanovic, 2023 ). In all these contexts, the rights to determine action may concern future action ( distal deontics ) or joint action unfolding locally in the encounter ( proximal deontics ), these two temporal fields being often intertwined in complex ways (see e.g., Stevanovic, 2015 ; Clifton et al, 2018 ; Magnusson, 2020 ; Stephenson, 2020 ; Van De Mieroop, 2020 ; Stevanovic et al, 2022 ).…”

“…For example, a mother may first seek to direct her child with a soft reminder that is oriented to the child's own desires and autonomy ( d'you wanna go pop your toothbrush back and give it a try ). Yet, if the child does not comply, the mother may ultimately need to reveal the real nature of her action: in reality, the child has no choice but to comply (see Henderson, 2020 ).…”