Invoking (Dis)Likes at the Dinner Table

What the paper says

Socializing children into proper eating habits often entails a great deal of “interactional bargaining”, a central resource of which comprises food assessments. Based on video recordings of mealtime conversations that involve a 3‐year‐old child and her parents, the current project further investigates how claims of (dis)likes are differentially deployed by parents and the child in pre‐taste and post‐taste positions (i.e., before and after tasting the food) not as expressions of stable psychological preferences, but as interactional resources for advancing the participants' own agendas in situ . As will be argued, it is via being repeatedly run through these (dis)like sequences that the child ascertains, deliberates, and revises her taste, all the while learning to use claims of (dis)likes to service her own projects in these food negotiations. Findings of this study contribute to our growing understandings of subject‐side assessments within the context of managing food resistance and socializing food preference in parent–child interaction.