Navigating Affiliation and Disaffiliation in the Work of Co-parenting

Abstract

Despite the wealth of literature on parenting styles and the vastly useful insights it has generated, we are yet to grasp how this complex parenting work is interactionally constituted. Based on 19 h of family mealtime interaction that involves a female child and her parents, I show how “wise parenting” manifests itself in the micro-seconds of parent–child interaction, and in particular, how the parents convey affiliative vs. disaffiliative stances respectively in response to the child’s request, resistance, and informing, and how they navigate this divergence. Findings expand the existing literature on parent–child interaction with specific regard to the joint endeavor of co-parenting in socializing the child, demonstrating “wise parenting” as an interactional enterprise cooperatively achieved by the parents. Data are in English.