Habits of the hearth: Children's bedtime routines as relational work
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Karen Gainer Sirota
Karen Gainer Sirota is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition, she holds a Master's degree in Social Work. Her long-range experience as a social work practitioner informs and enriches her research focus on discourse processes involving children and families.
Abstract
Drawing from a corpus of naturalistic videotaped data documenting everyday activities of 32 middle-class dual-earner families in Los Angeles, California, this article explores children's bedtime routines as an interactional matrix for carrying out culturally salient relational work, illustrating how family members co-participate in a ‘discourse of anticipation’ that prepares for—yet simultaneously forestalls—the moment of bedtime separation. Integrating research from psycho-cultural studies, language socialization, and conversation analysis, the article builds upon prior work on everyday routines as rich vehicles for cultural learning, discerning and tracing how parents and children co-constitute bedtime activities as collaboratively negotiated closing routines that foster autonomous self-initiative in tandem with a growing capacity for relational communion with others.
About the author
Karen Gainer Sirota is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition, she holds a Master's degree in Social Work. Her long-range experience as a social work practitioner informs and enriches her research focus on discourse processes involving children and families.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Advances in family interaction studies
- Introduction
- ‘Honey, I'm home!’: Framing in family dinnertime homecomings
- Retrospective and prospective orientation in the construction of argumentative moves
- Public medium, private talk: Gossip about a TV show as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’
- Habits of the hearth: Children's bedtime routines as relational work
- Participation, affect, and trajectory in family directive/response sequences
- Reshaping prior text, reshaping identities
- Parents' inquiries about homework: The first mention
- Intertextuality in interaction: Reframing family arguments in public and private
- Commentary 1. Doing family: An interactive accomplishment
- Commentary 2. Building the micros toward seeing the macro
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Advances in family interaction studies
- Introduction
- ‘Honey, I'm home!’: Framing in family dinnertime homecomings
- Retrospective and prospective orientation in the construction of argumentative moves
- Public medium, private talk: Gossip about a TV show as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’
- Habits of the hearth: Children's bedtime routines as relational work
- Participation, affect, and trajectory in family directive/response sequences
- Reshaping prior text, reshaping identities
- Parents' inquiries about homework: The first mention
- Intertextuality in interaction: Reframing family arguments in public and private
- Commentary 1. Doing family: An interactive accomplishment
- Commentary 2. Building the micros toward seeing the macro
