Socializing children to work: Parents’ accounts that position homework as a task to get out of the way

• In Event: Language, Social Interaction, and the Family

Abstract

This paper analyzes accounts that parents produce in conjunction with directives to children to start or finish their homework. The analysis first outlines some of the recurrent features of account sequences in this setting. The analysis then presents analysis of parents’ accounts that discursively construct homework as a task to get out of the way. The analysis furthermore suggests that this talk is implicated in socializing children into a worldview of work.

Author

• Leah Wingard, San Francisco State Univ