“But the vanilla is healthy!” Children's expression of arguments to justify their non-compliances in family conversation

Abstract

This study aims to explore how children express their need to account for actions by using valid arguments in order to prevent the non-compliance of a rule within family conversation. Previous works have shown the relevance of parental requests towards children and the need to account for a violation or for incorrect verbal expressions. The present case study is based on the argumentative analysis of a corpus of data concerning a family, within a large set of recordings of 76 dinners, held by 23 Italian middle-class families selected on the grounds of similar criteria. We specifically focused on the observation of a family in which children are accounting for their actions to verbally justify the non-compliance of a rule indicated by a parent. Findings indicate that children express a variety of arguments to justify their non-compliances with a parental directive: in the case of young children (3–6 years old), their justifications can be considered as the beginning of argumentative reasoning skills. The results of this study bring further light on the actual knowledge of argumentative interactions and the interplay between the expression of justifications and the argumentative skills of children to account for their non-compliances within the family arena.