Part B: Offers and children’s rights

Building on prior work exploring the social and linguistic practices in infant eating interactions (e.g. Wiggins 2023; Wiggins & Keevallik, 2021) this research uses an EMCA approach to explore how mealtime interactions are managed as a professional co-constructed activity between infants and early childhood teachers. In the UK, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa hold the highest mortality rate of all mental health diseases (Edakubo & Fushimi, 2020) and 64.2% of adults are either overweight or obese (House of Commons Obesity Statistics, 2022). The importance of building healthy relationships with food early on is therefore of paramount importance.

Here we will look at footage recorded during one week in April this year (2023) in an early childhood setting in Mid-Wales, where offers and recruitments are oriented to throughout the data. Influential work in this area by Kendrick and Drew (2016) suggests a continuum of recruitments and offers – where ‘embodied displays of trouble’ as recruitment for assistance are of particular interest here.

In this data session, two pieces of footage will be shared, with a specific interest in:

1) Infant recruitment of help through embodied ‘showing’ (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007) an item causing a problem as a First Pair Part (FPP), initiating joint attention that prompts a Second Pair Part (SPP) offer from an adult in the shape of ‘do you want me to xx’

2) Adult FPP offer of help that is not stimulated by infant ‘showing’ an item, in the shape of ‘would you like me to xx’

3) Adult embodied actions that uphold infant children’s rights to choose, at their pace, when/if they want to receive help

Transcripts

Beakers (transcript 1)

(data removed)

Yoghurts (transcript 2)

(data removed)

References

Edakubo, S. and Fushimi, K. (2020). Mortality and risk assessment for anorexia nervosa in acute-care hospitals: a nationwide administrative database analysis, BMC Psychiatry, 20(19). Available: https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-020-2433- 8#:~:text=Background,characteristics%20and%20treatment%20for%20AN.

House of Commons Obesity Statistics, (2022). Available from: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03336/SN03336.pdf

Kobin H. Kendrick & Paul Drew (2016) Recruitment: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49:1, 1-19, DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2016.1126436

Wiggins, S.(2023). How infant food likes become established as knowledge: Parental food assessments during infant mealtimes in the home. Appetite. 184, 106489.

Wiggins, S. & Keevallik, L. (2021). Parental lip-smacks during infant mealtimes: Multimodal features and social functions. Interactional Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/il.21006.wig