Requests to children by parents with aphasia

Abstract

Background: With an increasing number of young adult stroke survivors, there is a specific need to investigate how aphasia affects parenting. Raising a child happens through interaction, and centrally involves requests, such as ‘go to bed’, and ‘sit still’. Aphasia may impede participation in interaction and thus potentially also the possibilities to make requests to children and–from a wider perspective–do parenting. Aims: This study aims to explore practices employed by parents with aphasia to ask their children to do or to stop an action during everyday interactions (e.g. mealtimes, games). The design of requests is systematically examined to shed light on the way deontic authority (the right to direct another person’s future action) is displayed by parents with aphasia. Methods & Procedures: Using conversation analysis (CA), we carried out a collection-based study of 46 request sequences in 10 hours of video recordings involving three parents with aphasia (two with mild and one with severe aphasia). Outcomes & Results: Stopping a child’s action may be easier to achieve than getting a child to do something, as it requires less specification of the action. Furthermore, the severity of aphasia may limit the fine-tuning of deontic authority. The persons with mild aphasia adjust the degree of authority for example by adding mitigating words, such as ‘a bit’. The person with severe aphasia uses requests that mostly show unmitigated authority for example by using higher volume. Structured contexts, such as games and mealtimes, may offer resources for all three parents with aphasia because they provide scaffolded interaction. Conclusions: The analysis offers insights into practices that may allow or hinder these parents with aphasia to perform requests and thus to engage in parenting and participate in family life. Our findings suggest that people with aphasia could benefit from training to implement activities such as requesting in rehabilitation.