2021 Volume 20 Pages 3-16
Japanese society has been caught between the socialization and the privatization of childcare. Matsuki (2013) discussed how this dilemma is experienced by those who provide childcare to families. However, the perspective of parents who receive childcare services and their management of this dilemma as they seek social support in raising their children also need to be understood. To answer these questions, this study focuses on interactions between parents of infants in kosodate hiroba, comparing how a parent gives directives to her own child and how other adults there do so to the same child. Kosodate hiroba is a place where parents of infants gather with their children. Videos of interactions in this setting were examined using Conversation Analysis. Based on the “position and composition” (Schegloff 2007) of directives, the following observations were made. First, directives addressed to a child by a person other than his or her parent are mitigated before the child’s parent gives a directive to the child, except for “control touches” (Goodwin and Cekaite 2018) to protect the child or another child from physical danger. Secondly, there is a type of directive that a person other than the parent of the child in question can produce only after the parent gives directives to her child. This is the type of directive that explicitly treats the child’s behavior as bad with a negative descriptor such as “dame (no good).” This type of directive is used by a person other than the child’s parent after the parent has uttered a directive addressing her child and resolved the problem caused by the child’s behavior in question. Thus, these directives are given more to teach the child good manners than to actually control his or her behavior. By giving such directives to children of other parents, parents in kosodate hiroba support each other’s child raising. In this sense, they are “doing parenting companions.”
