ABSTRACT
In 1984 Susan Ervin-Tripp and her collaborators published an article called "Language and Power in the Family." This paper was based on research among four middle-class Berkeley, California families and concentrated on forms of requesting, or how children make requests of their primary caretaker. It was a paper about deference, demeanor, and mothering. The findings were intriguing and raised many questions about the relative distribution of power at least in four U. S. nuclear families. Dr. Ervin-Tripp and colleagues asserted that the children internalized gender rankings by using less polite forms to their mothers, and more mitigating expressions with their fathers. Specifically they found:
The mothers in our sample were an important exception to the pattern of power and esteem correlating with age. In their role as care givers, they received non-deferent orders, suggesting that the children expected compliance and believed their desires to be justification . . . Though based on a small sample, these findings suggest many areas of family interaction that provide the training ground for later patterns of social behavior. In many respects, the structure of power and deference in adult life is prefigured in the families. (Ervin-Tripp, O'Connor, & Rosenberg, 1984, p. 135)
