This book provides a detailed account of the social interactions that children experience during their everyday interactions with their parents, and focuses in particular on the act of agreeing or disagreeing. Socialization is operationalized as the process through which children acquire the status of a competent member of society. After a brief introduction, the book explores the historical context as well as repostulating ethno-methodological (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) studies within the field of studies on socialization. It does this by first describing the different sociological theories that have dominated socialization studies since the 1950s, then by arguing for a respecification of such studies to better understand the socialization processes that children experience.

Next, it outlines the methodological approaches taken, focusing on the practical processes that formed the corpus of data. The corpus consists of audio-visual data, and therefore an explanation of how the data was collected, with accompanying examples, is given. This helps situate the reader to better understand what the analyses will be based on. It then finishes with the methodological implications of these practices. The overall aim of this chapter is to allow the reader to understand the complex links between data collection, transcription, and analysis.

The next few chapters provide the analysis of the interactions that children and parents have via the presentation and examination of twelve different extracts selected by the author. These extracts highlight how immediate context is vital in providing children with essential resources in interaction. More specifically, it highlights how children tend to view interactions with others, and in these instances their parents, in a more social light rather than as language or information exchanges. From a parent's perspective, the most common response to a child's assessment of a situation is agreement, which is similar to findings from research that has focused on adult-adult interactions. The only real difference is the weaker levels of agreement adults tend to have with children in comparison to other adults. Another chapter then explores how adults choose to disagree with children. Again, how adults choose to disagree with children mirrors that of how they choose to disagree with each other, that is, using delay tactics, mitigated forms, compromises, and the like. Alternatively, sometimes parents choose other methods of disagreement, which tend to be more direct, in order to clearly defend their positions on a given matter. Most of these decisions are influenced by the preferences parents have about given situations, which in turn are dictated by moral concerns that the parents may have.

The final chapter of the book connects the themes throughout the book in order to discuss the implications of the findings of this study. This study reveals how children act within the process of becoming a competent member of society via different strategies that either force other interactants to agree or disagree with them. It also highlights how children themselves are possibly more important in this process than social, historical or cultural influences.