ABSTRACT
This chapter explores caregiver control touch in encouraging children to comply with the normative rules of everyday social life. Based on linguistic and ethnographic methods undertaken in a Japanese and Swedish preschool, the analysis focuses on control touch in episodes where preschool teachers in the two societies mediated in peer conflict (e.g., hitting, taking another’s toy away). The analysis shows how teachers used control touch with other communicative resources such as gaze, talk, and participation frameworks in intervening in the conflict, which included engaging children in moral discourse (e.g., you mustn’t do X). It also shows how they used control touch in facilitating reparatory activity between the children involved. This included arranging children’s bodies in an interactional space so as to engage them in remedial work (e.g., say sorry) within face-to-face embodied formations. The cross-cultural findings suggest that control touch in preschool settings is a potentially rich arena for exploring children’s embodied socialization into moral and social accountability.
