ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I examined sequences in which a parent responds with an agreement to a child’s assessment. I showed that with regard to agreements following assessments, parents’ and children’s preference organization does not seem to be fundamentally different from what is known about adults’ ways of dealing with it. Indeed, the preferred action—agreement—was usually achieved through the deployment of a preferred format; in other words, agreement occurred without delay, was direct, and expressed the agreement clearly. At the same time, I highlighted that instead of using strong agreements (as has been observed in adult–adult interactions), parents deployed different types of weak agreements in responding to their children’s assessments. It has been suggested that parents’ recurrent use of weak agreements manifests their sensitivity to the action that the child’s initial assessment accomplishes (and more generally, their orientation to the praxeological context in which the child initiates an assessment sequence) and that parents’ and children’s ways of using and treating weak agreements indicate both interactants’ orientations toward specific rights and obligations conventionally attributed to the categories of “parents” and “children.”
