The interactional practices of restricting children’s television viewing
Mediating and restricting children’s media use is an everyday task for contemporary families. In this paper I examine the negotiations of children’s media use as a social practice in which parents and children occupy various deontic and epistemic statuses. The data consist of video recordings captured in 26 Finnish families. A total of 44 occurrences in which parents restrict their children’s media use are examined. Conversation analysis is the method of this study. The results reveal how restrictions are linked not only to the amount of media use and the quality of media content but also to the time management of families and children’s socialization on a larger scale. Further, I examine children’s agency and interactional strategies to resist parental authority. I also show how these strategies vary with the age of children.