Morality-in-interaction: Toddlers’ recyclings of institutional discourses of feeling during peer disputes in daycare

Abstract

Abstract Everyday discursive practices comprising “emotion talk” constitute a site where morality is socialized. Yet few studies have examined how emotional expressions are assembled and serve as integral parts of the unfolding action in multi-party, remedial interchanges involving caregivers and children in early care settings. This paper examines a particular type of emotion talk, complement constructions with verbs of feeling (“want”) and saying (e.g., “Are you saying ‘no don’t stand on me’?) primed by caregivers as part of a curriculum encouraging children to use their words to express their feelings so children become sensitized to one another’s hurt feeling during peer disputes. The data were drawn from a larger corpus of video recordings of children’s naturalistic interaction collected over two years in two toddler-infant daycare centers with children aged 12–30 months. A talk-in-interaction approach was adopted. The syntactic formats provided to children by caregivers, and how children and caregivers recycled and laminated utterances with different kinds of modalities over turns, uncovered usually unarticulated normative socio-cultural assumptions regarding the shaping of affect at the daycare. The results illustrate how affective work in remedial interchanges provides a resource for participants to articulate moral values and underscore children’s agency.