“I Comply with the Recommendations”: The Interactional Construction of ‘Good Parenting’ in Pediatrician-Parent Conversations

Abstract

The paper sheds light on the invisible pedagogical dimension of pediatrician-parent interactions. It does so by adopting a Conversation Analysis-informed approach to a corpus of 23 video-recorded well-child visits involving two pediatricians and twenty-two families with children aged 0 to 18 months. In particular, the analysis focuses on how a mother seeks the pediatrician’s advice on everyday baby care issues. The single-case analysis is illustrative of how parents in this corpus, when seeking advice, perform themselves as “good” parents: competent and knowledgeable on caring practices, concerned by their children’s well-being, and concurrently sensitive to the ultimate epistemic and deontic authority of the pediatricians.