“You should have done it earlier”: The morality of time management in parent-child homework interactions

In recent years, research on family life has stressed that time management strategies constitute a survival skill for fast-paced, modern families. Despite its crucial importance, however, time management is still little explored as an interactive accomplishment of family members and a socializing experience. Adopting a Conversation Analysis informed approach, this article analyzes video-recorded parent-child interactions about time management during homework. The analysis illustrates that parents put homework first in the temporal sequence of children’s routines, constituting it as an activity that should be carried out early in the afternoon, before any other enterprise, and with no interruption. In the conclusion, we argue that parent-child conversations about time management and priorities constitute a locus where moral stances and cultural beliefs are displayed. By taking part in such ordinary interactions, children are socialized not only to the importance of homework as emerging from its temporal collocation, but also to the cultural value of time and morally appropriate ways of using it.