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Gaze as Social Control: How Very Young Children Differentiate “The Look” From a “Mere Look” by Their Adult Caregivers Mardi Kidwell Department of Communication University of New Hampshire In this article, I examine very young children’s differentiations of the gazing actions of their adult caregivers for how they do or do not implicate an intervention in their sanctionable activities. Such features of a gaze as (a) its duration, (b) whether or not it “fixes” on a target, and (c) its production relative to other activities of the caregiver constitute some gazes as mere shifts of visual attention to check children’s activities and others as portending an intervention. I hence demonstrate two practices of look- ing, termed here a mere look and the look, to project in different ways for children what another will do next. At issue is how children manage their conduct by refer- ence to their assessments of caregivers’ gazes and how caregivers’ deployment of the look provides for children’s systematic self-inspection of and self-action toward the aspects of their conduct they take to have drawn a caregiver’s gaze. When children ages 1 to 2½ years in a day care center engage in such activities as biting, hitting, pushing, or taking toys away from their peers, they sometimes look to a caregiver to see if she is looking at them. 1 Contin- gent on whether or not she is in fact looking in addition to how she looks, children may continue, revise, or cease altogether their activities. Drawing Research on Language and Social Interaction, 38(4), 417–449 Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Part of this article was first presented at the National Communication Association annual meeting in 2003. I thank Editor Don Zimmerman, Gene Lerner, Sally Jacoby, Chris Koenig, Federico Rossano, and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. Thank you also to Anita Pomerantz for her suggestions. Correspondence should be sent to Mardi Kidwell, Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Horton Social Science Center, 20 College Road, Durham, NH 03824. E-mail: [email protected]

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Page 1: Gaze as Social Control: How Very Young Children ...ibrdar/komunikacija/seminari/Kidwell, 2005 - Gaze as social control... · Gaze as Social Control: How Very Young Children Differentiate

Gaze as Social Control: How Very YoungChildren Differentiate “The Look”

From a “Mere Look” by Their Adult Caregivers

Mardi KidwellDepartment of CommunicationUniversity of New Hampshire

In this article, I examine very young children’s differentiations of the gazing actionsof their adult caregivers for how they do or do not implicate an intervention in theirsanctionable activities. Such features of a gaze as (a) its duration, (b) whether or not it“fixes” on a target, and (c) its production relative to other activities of the caregiverconstitute some gazes as mere shifts of visual attention to check children’s activitiesand others as portending an intervention. I hence demonstrate two practices of look-ing, termed here a mere look and the look, to project in different ways for childrenwhat another will do next. At issue is how children manage their conduct by refer-ence to their assessments of caregivers’ gazes and how caregivers’ deployment of thelook provides for children’s systematic self-inspection of and self-action toward theaspects of their conduct they take to have drawn a caregiver’s gaze.

When children ages 1 to 2½ years in a day care center engage in suchactivities as biting, hitting, pushing, or taking toys away from their peers,they sometimes look to a caregiver to see if she is looking at them.1 Contin-gent on whether or not she is in fact looking in addition to how she looks,children may continue, revise, or cease altogether their activities. Drawing

Research on Language and Social Interaction, 38(4), 417–449Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Part of this article was first presented at the National Communication Association annual meetingin 2003. I thank Editor Don Zimmerman, Gene Lerner, Sally Jacoby, Chris Koenig, FedericoRossano, and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions onearlier drafts of this article. Thank you also to Anita Pomerantz for her suggestions.

Correspondence should be sent to Mardi Kidwell, Department of Communication, Universityof New Hampshire, Horton Social Science Center, 20 College Road, Durham, NH 03824.E-mail: [email protected]

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on a collection of 450 instances of children involved in sanctionable activi-ties, it is this latter topic, how a caregiver looks at children and children’sabilities to differentiate their caregivers’ gazes as ones that do or do not im-plicate an intervention in their activities, that I take up in this article.

Caregivers, who have as their job overseeing all manner of children’sactivities, are attentive to and monitor them for signs of “trouble.” As such,their visual regard of children often takes place as they themselves are in-volved in the various events, situations, and/or tasks associated with theirinstitutional roles as young children’s care providers. For example, as theyprepare a bottle for a child or speak with a parent, their attentions may bedrawn to a particular child’s “problem conduct,” that is, conduct that mayrequire them to act. Put another way, the day care social world presents ahost of demands on the attentions of caregivers, and their shifts of attentionfrom one matter to another are produced in orderly ways. How these shiftsof attention are accomplished, of course, provides for how they may be dis-tinguished by co-present others as being produced to serve different ends.Specifically, are they made to merely check some event in the environmentthat has drawn a caregiver’s attention, or do they forecast a course of actionthat will be taken with respect to that event?

In the cases that follow, I demonstrate that although some gazing ac-tions by caregivers are made as brief shifts of visual attention to merelycheck children’s activities, other gazes forecast action such that childrenmay cease or revise their activities—before a caregiver in fact takes actionto get them to stop. The first sort of gazing action is pervasive, one bywhich people regularly take notice of the objects, features, and events intheir environment and in the data I examine in this article, while they aredoing something else. The second, however, seems to be restricted to envi-ronments in which those participants to whom the gaze is directed are en-gaged in problem conduct; these gazes are assessable as such, in part, be-cause caregivers stop what they are doing when they make the gaze. Hence,two practices of looking by caregivers, what I term here a mere look and thelook, are demonstrated to project in different ways for children what a care-giver will do next. In this article, I examine how the constitutive features ofthese gazes provide a resource for children to assess whether or not a care-giver will intervene in their activities and how subsequently, children orga-nize their activities as a response to their assessments. This is a topic thatdraws on a number of themes relating to gaze, the fundamental manage-ment of face-to-face interaction, and the emergence of very young chil-dren’s sociality. This last topic concerns how children come to be orientedto the moment-by-moment contingencies by which the norms and rules of

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day care social life may or may not be enforced by caregivers on the actual,real-time occasions of their sanctionable activities.

GAZE AS DIFFERENTIABLECOMMUNICATIVE ACTION

First, mutual gaze, that situation when two parties’ eyes meet, is asso-ciated on one hand with such communicative, social, and affective mattersas intimacy, attraction, credibility, and persuasiveness (Beebee, 1974;Burgoon, Manusov, Mineo, & Hale, 1985; Exline, 1963; Kendon & Cook,1969; Kurzban, 2001) and on the other with threat displays, dominance,and hostility (Ellsworth, 1975; Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Henson, 1972;Ellsworth & Langer, 1976; Exline, 1974; Smith, Sanford, & Goldman,1977). In other words, gaze directed at another, and another’s looking back,means many different things. How then do interactants discern the importof another’s gaze toward them? Such factors as those having to do with theduration and frequency of gazes (Kendon, 1967, 1990), the personality andrelational characteristics of the interactants (Burgoon et al., 1985; Cordell& McGahan, 2004), and situational factors (Mazur et al., 1980) have beenfound to invest gazes with their sense.

In this article, I demonstrate that the sense of a gaze by one toward an-other derives from the various features of its visible character, specificallythose having to do with how it is produced and where relative to a course ofongoing action. Although participants’ membership in category “child”and category “caregiver” is certainly a relevant issue regarding children’sorientations to how a caregiver’s look toward them may be of consequence(and, hence, their orientations toward their caregivers as potential interven-ers in their sanctionable activities), the analyses I present here show that theimport of a gaze is a locally contingent, interactionally achieved matter. Inthis way, in this article, I expand the notion of gaze as communicative ac-tion specifically with respect to how gaze comes to be differentially action-able for participants in the real-time unfolding of naturally occurring socialinteraction.

GAZE AND THE MANAGEMENTOF FACE-TO-FACE ACTIVITIES

As a second issue, scholars have long noted that mutual gaze fos-ters a moment of “connection” between parties and requires, and evokes,

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their response (Argyle & Cook, 1976; Ellsworth et al., 1972; Kendon,1967; Mazur et al., 1980; Simmel 1908/1969). Goffman (1963) discussedthe role of looking at another and the other looking back as a crucial firststep in establishing engagement in face-to-face interaction. Goffman(1963, p. 95) noted that in the public realm, the norms of civil inattention(i.e., the practices of not looking or of looking only briefly) usually ac-corded strangers make visible a look as a method for the initiation of anencounter. A number of scholars have also investigated the role of look-ing in the regulation of speaker–listener activities in conversation. Ken-don (1967, 1990), for example, has found that during the production oflong utterances, speakers tend to look away from listeners and look backat them as they reach the end, and in so doing, accomplish “floor appor-tionment” (Kendon, 1990, pp. 60–65). Goodwin (1981) has demonstratedthe ways in which speakers take, and seek out, listener gaze toward themas a show of attentiveness to their talk, finding that when speakers do nothave the gaze of a listener, they may break off their speech until listenersmove their gaze to them. Bavelas, Coates, and Johnson (2002) have notedthat when speakers look to a listener during the production of a narrative,listeners typically issue a response token such as “mhm” or a nod. Thesestudies (and others; see, e.g., Egbert, 1996; Kidwell, 1997; Lerner, 2003;Rutter, 1984 ) have demonstrated a variety of ways in which gaze is bothintegral to the initiation of face-to-face interaction and at systematicpoints in an interaction, that it is an essential part of the interactional ma-chinery by which participants sustain and regulate their conjoined activi-ties, in particular, their talk.

In this article, however, talk is only a limited resource with which 1- to2½-year-old children in a day care center engage others. Moreover, thesorts of situations that are under examination here may be considered to fallsomewhere at “the edges” of the actual initiation and maintenance of con-joined activities. My concern in this article is with those interactional ac-tivities that are possible precursors to a line of engagement betweeninteractants, which, if launched, would have to do with caregivers’ effortsto get children to halt their sanctionable conduct.2 Thus, as the situationsthat are examined here involve children’s conduct at the peripheries of en-gagement with their caregivers, the concern is with those resources that en-able them to assess others’ activities for how they may—possibly—be ofimport for their own. These resources turn out to be, quite centrally, the em-bodied features of others’ conduct, in particular, their gaze.

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CHILDREN’S EMERGENT SOCIALITY

As a third issue, children’s own gazing abilities, and by extension theiremerging responsiveness to others’ gazes, provide a much earlier founda-tion than talk for their engagement in and management of face-to-face ac-tivities. A large body of research in cognitive and developmental psychol-ogy concerning the joint attention abilities of infants and very youngchildren (i.e., their abilities to share attention with others toward a thirdperson, object, or event) has documented the emergence of their gazing be-haviors in the 9- to 18-month age range (e.g., Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner,1993). During this time, children begin to follow the gaze of others; directothers’ attention (e.g., with pointing); and check others’ attention towardhappenings in the environment, especially that of their parents (Tomasello,1999). This line of research links such attention organizing capacities withchildren’s developmental progress in understanding the beliefs, desires,and intentions of others (see, e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1991, 1993; Bruner, 1995;Meltzoff & Gopnick, 1993). In this way, a primary concern of this researchhas been with what these capacities reveal about the development of humanmental life.

In contrast, in this article, I examine gaze as a social matter, in particu-lar, how gaze directed at another can constitute a method of social control.On this point, Foucault (1977) captured the pervasive and institutionalizedforce of gaze through his notion of “panopticism”: the ordering of people insuch organizations as prisons (but also, e.g., in schools) to maximize theirsurveillance, in this way subjecting them to what is termed both literallyand metaphorically, the “disciplinary gaze” (Kivett & Warren, 2002). Thisnotion of Foucault’s, similar to Goffman’s (1961) notion of the “total insti-tution,” finds parallels in the everyday social world of the day care center.That is, the day care center is an environment of “constant potential scru-tiny” of children by their caregivers (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2005). A cen-tral issue, then, is how very young children come to understand the system-atic ways by which people and their actions come to be available to othersfor assessment, what following Sacks (1980, 1985) and Goffman (1963)may be termed an “organization of observability.”

Children who are in the throes of learning just what sorts of activitieswill draw a caregiver’s intervening response are also learning—more sig-nificantly—that sometimes caregivers intervene in their sanctionable activ-ities, and sometimes they don’t. That is, there is a range of contingencies

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that affect a caregiver’s response, a most basic one being whether or not shesees their activities in the first place.

In the cases that follow, I demonstrate that children assess quitenuanced features of caregivers’ gazes, features that constitute them as dis-tinct social actions, as mere looks and the look. Moreover, I demonstratethat children organize their conduct responsively to these two gazing ac-tions in rather strategic ways.

DATA AND METHOD

The cases for this study were drawn from 500 hr of the videotaped,naturally occurring interactions of children who are between 1 and 2½years in two different infant-toddler day care centers. From this data set,450 instances of children involved in sanctionable activities were collected.These are activities such as the ones I mentioned at the outset (children’sharassments and/or posing a danger to their peers, e.g., by biting, hitting,pushing, or taking objects away from them; also situations of their “mis-handling” of objects and posing a danger to themselves, e.g., tearing upbooks or standing on furniture). Early investigations of the 450 instancesshowed that in 50 of them, children looked to their caregivers before or dur-ing their engagement in sanctionable (or, more aptly, potentially sanction-able) activities.

The primary evidence that caregivers’ gazes do indeed portend differ-ent possible consequences for children is drawn from children’s responsesto them. From the smaller collection of 50 instances, 7 cases of what I termin this paper the look and 5 cases of what I term mere looks have beenfound. These are cases in which there is evidence that the child sees thecaregiver’s gazing actions and is in some way responsive to them.3 In thisway, the children’s actions are used to satisfy a “proof criterion” regardingthe import of caregivers’ gazes (Schegloff, 1993; Schegloff & Sacks,1973).4 As a distributional matter, a consultation of other data materials5

shows that cases of mere looks are very common sorts of gazing actions forboth adults and children, whereas cases of the look, at least in the data ex-amined thus far, are limited to situations in which children are engaged inpotentially problem conduct (i.e., these sorts of gazing actions were notfound in the other data materials). I present in this article a selection of 6cases from the subset of the 12 cases that meet the proof criterion.

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Finally, how participants’ gazing actions were assessed as an analyticmatter bears consideration. In all of the data instances, the view of oneof the participant’s faces (the child’s or the caregiver’s) is obstructedat least part of the time. That is, the positioning of the camera and the factthat participants are moving allow only for views of the backs or sides ofthe interactants’ heads at various points. This has necessitated an analysisthat, at times, makes use of forms of “secondary” evidence to track theinteractants’ gazes: in particular, their head movements, their facial pro-files, their talk (if any), and the actions of the other participant. In combina-tion, these details provide very strong evidence for where participants arelooking.

I present cases using a combination of narrative descriptions and videoframe grabs in addition to transcriptions of talk and body behaviors usingthe conventions developed by conversation analysts for the former andthose developed by Goodwin (e.g., 1981) for the latter (with some modifi-cations). For an explanation of the transcription conventions used, pleasesee the Appendix.

ANALYSIS

In the cases that follow, I demonstrate that the gazing actions termed inthis article a mere look and the look differ in terms of three main features:(a) their duration; (b) whether or not they “fix” on a target; and (b), as dis-cussed at the outset, their production relative to other activities that thecaregiver is involved in. Children, through their analyses of caregivers’gazes, show themselves to be oriented both to what has drawn a caregiver’sgaze (and, therefore, what is potentially sanctionable about their conduct)and also what, being a target of a certain sort of gaze, caregivers (and by ex-tension children themselves) might relevantly do next.

The analysis proceeds as follows. I present Case 1 as an exemplar casecontaining instances of both a mere look and the look by a caregiver thatshows especially clearly how a child differentiates the two actions. Thislays the groundwork for an examination of subsequent cases in which it isdemonstrated that (a) there are some variations in the way the features ofthe two gazing actions are realized and (b) how they are positioned in anongoing sequence of action between children and caregivers can affecttheir treatment by children.

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Case 1: How Children Differentiate a Mere LookFrom the Look

In Case 1, two children are seated in front of a caregiver (CG) who isreading a storybook to them. One of the children, Aaron (A), at variouspoints strikes, pats, and touches the other child, Heather (H), on the head,and he notices the caregiver’s looks toward him. Of interest is how heceases these actions as a response to the caregiver’s later gazing actions butnot the earlier ones.

A process of mutual monitoring. A close analysis of Aaron’s and thecaregiver’s actions early in the segment shows that Aaron sees that the care-giver sees him and his actions toward Heather through a process of mutual,differentially timed, monitoring: Aaron looks at the caregiver as he strikesand pats Heather, then away. She looks at him, then away, and then he looksat her again and then away. With this last look, Aaron, drawn by the care-giver’s look toward him, catches the caregiver returning her gaze to thebook. It is the caregiver’s gazing action here that I examine.

As participants in the activity of a storybook reading, Aaron’s andthe caregiver’s intermittent gazes toward one another are relevant actionsassociated with their roles as story reader and recipient. However,Aaron’s actions toward Heather become the central event around whichtheir gazes are organized. The timing and focus of their gazes shows thatthe caregiver checks what Aaron is doing when she looks up, and a mo-ment later Aaron checks the caregiver checking him. How it is that Aarontreats the caregiver’s gaze at this point in the segment as not portendingan intervention in his activities derives from specific features of her gazethat constitute it as an action in passing: It is a mere look, a glance ofsorts; the caregiver’s action here shows that although she has taken in theactivities transpiring before her, she does not in fact intend to take furtheraction toward Aaron.

A mere look. When the caregiver looks toward Aaron, she producesa look that is relatively brief (.9 sec from shift begin to shift end).6 This is alook that the caregiver makes as she reads, a point made visible by the care-giver’s open mouth when she first looks up at Aaron (Figure 1). At thispoint, Aaron’s gaze is still directed toward Heather; he turns his gaze to thecaregiver a moment later when she has begun to look away (Figure 2):

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CG looks up at A, then back down at book (.9 duration).. . X__________, x

1 CG: THEN ( .2 ) little nut brown ha:re ( .2) had a good idea:,.X

A looks from H to CG

2 ( .7 )3 CG: He tumbled u:pside down and reached up the tree trunk with his feet.

Moreover, when the caregiver looks up and then back down at the book, thereis no noticeable change in the intonation or cadence of her talk. She looks upnot at a place of possible syntactic completion in the line of text but in themiddle of a syntactic unit (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974),7 andtherearenopausesor“hitches” in theprogressionofher reading.Thus, as thetranscript and figures show, the caregiver’s look does not interrupt her activ-ity of reading. Indeed, as the caregiver reaches the end of a possibly completesyntactic unit at the end of line 1 with “idea,” and she has returned her full vi-sual focus to thebook, shecontinues reading(line3).8 In theseways, thecare-giverpreserves theactivityof readingas themainactivity,whereas lookingatAaron is done as an activity in passing. Aaron, seeing that the caregiver hasseen him while she reads and then looked back at the book, treats this as evi-dence that she will not take further, possibly interventive action toward him.He continues striking, patting, and touching Heather.

The caregiver’s next gazing actions serve to get Aaron to cease hisactivities.

“The look.” Several seconds later in the segment, Aaron, who hasstopped striking Heather, resumes the activity. The caregiver makes threelooks in quick succession toward the children.

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FIGURE 2FIGURE 1

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The caregiver’s first look in the series is similar to the kind of look that shemade in the prior segment: it is a mere look, a glance in which she briefly looksup at the children in the middle of a syntactic unit9 and then back down at thebook(anactionwithadurationof .7secfromshiftbegin toshiftend; line1,andFigures 3, 4, and 5). During the caregiver’s brief look, Aaron maintains his fo-cusonHeatherashestrikesherandattempts togetholdofhershirt.10 Whenthecaregiver looksdown,Heather,whohasbeensilent throughoutAaron’sactivi-ties, cries out (line 2), and the caregiver looks back up (Figure 6). This is thesecond look in the succession of three and the first of two longer looks that thecaregiver makes toward the children. In contrast with the caregiver’s first look,the mere look, when the caregiver looks up the second time, she is just comingto a place of syntactic completion in the line of storybook text.

CG looks up at children (.7), down at book, looks up at children. . X_____ , x . X

1 CG: I wish I could ho[p like that.

2 H: [ Aihhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

FIGURE 5FIGURE 4

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FIGURE 6FIGURE 3

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The caregiver having arrived at a place of syntactic completion nowgazes at the children (Figure 6). Pressing her lips together, she holds hergaze for a relatively long duration of 1.6 sec. The caregiver’s look travelsfrom Heather’s face, to Aaron’s hand now pulling on Heather’s shirt, andback to Heather. Both children have shifted their gaze to the caregiver asshe gazes at them, and Aaron, as he looks at the caregiver, keeps a hold onHeather’s shirt. The caregiver then looks down at the book and back up rel-atively quickly (after .5 sec) with lips pressed together even more tightly.This is the third look in the series of three and the second sustained lookthat the caregiver makes. With this second sustained look, the caregiveragain moves her gaze from Heather, to Aaron’s hand, and back to Heather’sface, a look that lasts for a duration of 2.5 sec. As the caregiver moves hergaze, she presses her lips together more tightly in a “stretched-lip” sort ofgesture (Figure 7):

CG looks up at children (.7), down at book, looks up at children (1.6). down at book, up atchildren (2.5)

. . X_____ , x . X ________, x . X _______________1 CG: I wish I could ho [p like that.2 H: [ Aihhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

The caregiver’s last two gazing actions are instances of what I characterizein this article as giving children the look. In contrast with a mere look, thecaregiver, having given up for the moment the activity of reading, nowgazes at the children with lips pressed together for over 4 sec during theselast two looks. That looking, and not reading, is now the caregiver’s mainactivity is underscored by her closed lips. In this way, the caregiver makessalient her cessation of reading. During this last look, Aaron lets go of

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FIGURE 6FIGURE 7

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Heather (line 3), on which the caregiver looks back down at the book andresumes reading (line 5; Figure 8).11

Looks up at children (2.5), down at book. . X_____ , x . X _________, x . X _________[__ , , x

1 CG: I wish I could ho[p like that.2 H: [ Aihhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!3 A: [lets go4 (1.3)5 CG: I love you: A::ll the way down the la:ne, and as fa:r as the river.

Discussion

Case 1 demonstrates that Aaron is attentive not only to whether or notthe caregiver looks toward him, but he is attentive and responsive as wellfor how she looks. Specifically, Aaron treats some gazes by the caregiver as“intervention implicative” but not others. I summarize as follows the waysin which the features of the caregiver’s gazes differ and thus enable Aaronto make these distinctions:

Summary features of a mere look and the look.

A mere look

• Is of relatively short duration• Alights briefly on a target (or targets)

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FIGURE 8

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• Is produced concurrently with other activities that the caregiver isinvolved in

The look

• Is of relatively long duration• Fixes on a target (or targets)12

• Is made as a “new” activity

Thus, whereas a mere look is a relatively short gazing action that fleetspast a target, the look is of longer duration—it is at least long enough toshow that something has “caught,” and is holding, the caregiver’s attention;in this way, it has a “sustained” quality.13 The duration of a gaze is certainlypart of what makes visible whether something is or is not holding thegazer’s attention. However, the quality of the head movement also plays arole: With the mere look, the caregiver’s head movement is fairly smooth,as her gaze moves up from the book to the children and back to the book;with the look, her head stops moving. Moreover, a mere look, produced as itis concurrently with the caregiver’s reading, is produced as part of that ac-tivity, in this way making it a look of no immediate consequence for thechild (cf. Goodwin, 1986, p. 44, for a similar analysis of a “glance”). Thelook, on the other hand, is produced as an activity in its own right. Spe-cifically, the caregiver halts the current activity, that is, reading, looks, andthen resumes the reading on withdrawing the look.14 In this way, the lookmay be considered a “new” activity in relation to the other activity. As anew activity, the look is one that has clear begin and end boundaries that setit off from the other activity. These boundaries are constituted not only inthe stops and restarts of the other activity but in the various bodily arrange-ments of the caregiver that underscore the cessation of the prior activity andcompose the new activity of looking as one that is distinct from the prior. InCase 1, the caregiver closes her lips and keeps them closed in a stretched-lip gesture by which she very noticeably marks the halting of the prior ac-tivity of reading and the prominence of the new activity of looking.

In sum, the caregiver, via the features of her later gazing actions incontrast to the earlier ones, locates for Aaron that something about whathe is doing is holding her attention. A result of this is that he holds his at-tention toward her, too, long enough to discern that her gaze toward himis more than just a passing event. Moreover, he has halted his pulling ac-

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tion on Heather but keeps a grasp on her shirt in a sort of “frozen” bodyposture as he gazes, evidence that he may resume the activity contingenton his assessment of the caregiver’s actions (a feature of children’s re-sponses to the look that I discuss in later cases). The halting of the read-ing activity by the caregiver, which I discuss following, arguably makesvisible to Aaron that the caregiver is ready to act toward him.15 In theseways, a mere look and the look are implicated in quite different se-quences of action.

A mere look and the look: Actions in a sequence of actions. That thecaregiver’s later gazes (the look) are indeed directed toward Aaron’s ac-tions toward Heather—and moreover, that he should cease these actions—is evidenced not only by Aaron’s cessation of the actions: It is evidenced aswell by the caregiver’s withdrawal of gaze shortly after their cessation andby her resumption of the reading activity. Of note here is that looks that areheld toward points in an environment are ones that regularly alert co-pres-ent others that there is something “attendable” in the environment, that is,that there is something to be inspected and possibly acted on. Such looksmay occasion others’ gaze follows to join in the looking. Put another way,such looks become occasions for the joint inspection of selected features ofan environment, locating for others possibly actionable events (Baron-Co-hen, 1995; Kidwell, 2003). In a related way in Case 1, the caregiver’s sus-tained looks toward the children in conjunction with the halting of the read-ing activity invite Aaron to inspect what it is about his conduct that hasdrawn her attention and subsequently, to remedy it. Thus, the caregiverholds her gaze toward the children, and when Aaron stops his activities, shewithdraws her gaze and begins reading again. The mere look and the look,then, as actions in a sequence of actions that are launched by the event ofchildren’s problem conduct—the event being one that draws the caregiver’sattention—unfolds as follows:

Mere lookEvent→[Look to Event→Look Away

[continue involvement in a current activity

The lookEvent→ [Look to Event→Hold Look until child ceases problem conduct→[Look Away

[halt involvement in a current activity [resumeactivity

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Of course, when a child does not cease the problem conduct on having beentargeted with the look, another sequence of actions is implicated, one I ex-amine in later cases:

The lookEvent→[Look to Event→Hold Look as child continues problem conduct→ [Intervene

[halt involvement in a current activity [don’tresumeactivity

Hence, with the look, a caregiver projects an intervention in children’s ac-tivities; when children do not cease the activities, caregivers may intervene.How the look accomplishes this as a contingent matter that is available tochildren—that is, contingent on children’s continuation or cessation of anactivity—is a product of the caregiver’s gazing action as it is produced rela-tive to another activity that she is involved in.

Projecting an intervention. As discussed previously, a caregiver, inhalting a current activity while looking toward a child, composes the lookas the new and prominent activity (i.e., in relation to the halted activity).Additionally, a caregiver having halted one activity is now poised to initi-ate another (in contrast to a mere look in which the caregiver continueswith the current activity), the nature of which is strongly prefigured byher gaze toward a child. Simply put, people tend to gaze toward whatthey are going to act on (thus, Goffman’s [1963] observation that gaze di-rected at another is a method of initiating an encounter; cf. Psathas, 1990,on how doctor’s move their gaze to the intake pad, thereby orienting apatient to this next activity in the consultation). Indeed, an inspection ofthe larger data set (the 450 instances) shows that in those instances inwhich caregivers intervened in children’s sanctionable activities (theseare cases in which caregiver’s faces were visible as they initiate an inter-vention), they looked toward the child (or children) who was the target oftheir action. Moreover, when caregivers are involved in something else(e.g., intervening in another child’s problem conduct or reading to achild), they halt that activity to initiate the activity of intervening.16 Thus,by halting a current activity as part of composing a gazing action as thelook, a caregiver projects a readiness for new action toward a child. This

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readiness is visible to a child who, as a preemptive move, may cease theproblem conduct and thereby evade an intervention.

In the following cases, I further examine the features of a mere lookand the look. These next cases provide a sense of the robustness of thesefeatures across cases as well as a sense of some of the ways in which theymay vary. An issue that emerges is how children are responsive to priorcontexts of sanctioning in their assessments of mere looks and how the lookis treated by children as intervention implicative even when no sanction hasbeen made.

Mere Looks: Contextual Considerations

That very young children may respond to what are termed heremere looks as being of no consequence for them is further evidencedin Cases 2 and 3. Of note is not only the similarities of the features ofthese gazes to those described for Case 1 but also that whether or notchildren have received a prior sanction for their activities can matterfor how they respond to a mere look. In this way, mere looks are con-sidered in this section as “context sensitive” social objects (Sacks etal., 1974).

Case 2: Child’s Treatment of a Mere Look Presanctionand Postsanction

In Case 2, as the caregiver reads to a group of children in front ofher, Emily approaches Karin from behind and places a cloth bandaround her neck. She is looking at the caregiver as she does this. As thecaregiver reads, she looks up from the book at Emily (more precisely,her gaze travels from Emily to Karin) then back down at the book. Thecaregiver looks up just as she is beginning a syntactic unit (line 1, Fig-ure 9) and then down in the middle of the syntactic unit (.8 sec fromshift begin to shift end), with no noticeable change in the intonation orcadence of her talk (compare with the two instances of a mere look inCase 1 in which the action is produced in the middle of a syntacticunit).

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CG looks up at children (.8), then down at bookX ______, x

1 CG: When the wi::nd whistles: ( .8 ) through the evergreen forest–

Although Emily sees that the caregiver sees her, like Aaron in Case 1,she treats the gazing action as inconsequential and continues her actions to-ward Karin. That this is not simply coincident with the caregiver’s gaze butis contingent on her assessment of features of the gaze that specificallycompose it as not intervention implicative is evidenced by what happensnext.

A few moments later, when the caregiver looks up and in fact sanctionsEmily (“I don’t think she wants that on her.”), Emily is quick to halt her ac-tions. Then, several seconds later, after resuming the actions, when thecaregiver casts another mere look her way, Emily also very quickly bringsher actions to a halt. In other words, Emily is responsive to verbal indica-tions from the caregiver that she should stop what she is doing; she is alsoresponsive to the fact that having already been sanctioned and now comingunder a second mere look, she is likely to be sanctioned again (and likelymore sternly). Hence, the organization of Emily’s conduct subsequent tothe caregiver’s two mere looks is different for each instance: The firstshe treats as inconsequential and the second as possibly resulting in anintervention.

In a very different way, the next case shows as well that children’s con-duct following their discernment of a mere look may be shaped by whetheror not they have received a prior sanction.

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FIGURE 9

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Case 3: Child’s Treatment of a Mere Lookin a Context of Explicit Nonsanctioning

In Case 3, Derrick (D) has been vigorously pounding with a toy ham-mer on the other side of a bookcase from Eathan (E). Eathan has beenloudly protesting this and making appeals to the nearby caregiver to getDerrick to stop. These appeals go unheeded by the caregiver. It is in thisenvironment of explicit nonsanctioning that Derrick carries on with hisactivities.

Derrick rounds the bookcase with the hammer held high in the air. Heis looking at the caregiver. The caregiver, who is seating herself, looks verybriefly at him (.2 sec from shift begin to shift end), then she moves her gazedown at the point where she is moving her hand to balance herself. Whenthe caregiver looks, her body positioning is particularly unstable, and she isvisibly undertaking to arrange herself in a seated position (Figure 10).Then, when she looks down, Derrick, who is still moving forward, raisesthe hammer a bit higher in the air and cocks it back (Figure 11).

Derrick then makes a rather abrupt turn toward Eathan (Figure 12) andbrings the hammer down on the bookcase, escalating his aggravation of theother child.

Thus, in Case 3, a child not only treats a caregiver’s mere look to-ward him as inconsequential for his activities, he also escalates themwith impunity in the context of the caregiver’s prior inaction toward him.Moreover, the case demonstrates that caregivers’ involvement in nonver-bal activities (here, seating oneself) as well as verbal (reading in Cases 1

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FIGURE 10 CG looks at D. D looks atCG.

FIGURE 11 CG looks down. D raiseshammer.

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and 2) provide for the visibility of a gaze in conjunction with its otherfeatures as a look in passing (which I examine, too, in cases of the look inthe next section). In sum, whereas mere looks by caregivers are generallytreated by children as being of no consequence for their activities (inCase 1, two instances of mere looks and the first mere look in Case 2),Cases 2 and 3 demonstrate that a prior sanction by the caregiver, or anexplicit nonsanction, can shape mere looks as rather different social ob-jects for children.

As a point of contrast, cases in the next section demonstrate that re-gardless of whether or not children have been previously sanctioned, theytreat the look by the caregiver as strongly intervention implicative.

The Look: Contextual Considerations

In this section, I examine a range of ways in which children respond tothe look as portending an intervention. As with Case 1, in these cases (withthe exception of Case 6), children have not received a prior sanction. A cen-tral point concerns how as caregiver and child gaze at one another, there is aplace in the exchange for each party to assess what the other will do nextand to design their own actions accordingly. For children, this means dis-cerning whether or not they should halt their sanctionable activities lest thecaregiver intervene and for caregivers, discerning whether or not theyshould intervene. How children organize the terminations of their saction-able activities, or alternately continue them, points up their nuanced assess-ments of caregivers’ gazes.

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FIGURE 12 D makes an abrupt turntoward E.

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Case 4: Child Responds to the Lookby Making Explicit His Termination of Activity

In Case 4, a caregiver has walked across the room and is in theprocess of seating herself on the floor when she looks toward Carlo (C)and Darryl (D). Carlo is making a pushing motion with his hand acrossDarryl’s chest (Figure 13). As the caregiver seats herself, Darryl lookstoward her. A moment later (1.0 sec), Carlo follows Darryl’s gazeand looks, too (Figure 14 ). Carlo sees that the caregiver is looking athim. The two hold their gaze toward one another for 1.3 sec (the care-giver’s gazing action has a duration of 3.1 sec from shift begin to shiftend).

As can be seen in the figures, the caregiver’s gaze is made as she isin the process of just finishing seating herself. Although she is still in-volved in this activity as she holds her gaze toward Carlo, it is project-ably coming to completion (cf. Lerner, 1991), and the gaze can be seen tobe “outlasting” her act of seating herself. This action is subtle in compar-ison to that of the caregiver in Case 1 who stops reading when she makesthe look toward Aaron. Nonetheless, about midway during the 1.3-secgaze between Carlo and the caregiver, Carlo stops swiping Darryl andholds his arm against the child. During this time, Carlo’s body takes on a“frozen” quality (compare with Aaron’s actions in Case 1). Then, Carlodrops his arm, and the caregiver shifts her gaze from him (Figure 15; cf.with Case 1, Figure 8). As soon as he drops his arm, Carlo walks over tothe caregiver, lowers his head, and stands by her (Figure 16).

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FIGURE 13 C is swiping D. As CGseats herself, she looks at C, and D

FIGURE 14 C follows D’s gaze to CG.C and CG hold mutual gaze for 1.3 sec.

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Thus, when Carlo and the caregiver engage in mutual gaze longenough for him to discern that she is in fact holding her gaze toward him, hestops pushing. In this way, Carlo designs his actions for the possibility of asanction. Moreover, he futher attends to this possibility when he distanceshimself from the other child and, lowering his head, takes up a positionright next to the caregiver. Whether Carlo’s actions (the head drop, themove next to the caregiver) are undertaken to show that he is now thor-oughly compliant in halting the prior activity (hence, a move to furtherthwart a possible sanction) or whether he is moving next to the caregiver togain her protection from Darryl, these actions nonetheless demonstrate—indeed, make unequivocal—that he is no longer involved in and will not re-sume what he might in fact have been sanctioned for (i.e., pushing Darryl).In this way, Carlo makes visibly explicit his termination of his activities.Carlo’s actions here, similar to other cases of children in the data set, are asignificant reorganization of his conduct that recasts him as a currentnonaggressor (Kidwell, 2003).

In sum, in this case, Carlo treats the caregiver’s gaze toward him asportending an intervention, and moreover, as in Case 1, he does so in a con-text of no prior sanctioning.17 Moreover, also as in Case 1, the caregiverwithdraws her gaze as soon as Carlo removes his hand from Darryl. Thus,the 1.3-sec moment of mutual gaze between the two provides for Carlo toassess that the caregiver is holding her gaze toward him, that is, towardsome aspect of his conduct; this moment also provides for the caregiver toassess whether or not Carlo will cease the conduct. The design and deploy-ment of the caregiver’ gaze to accomplish this is then evidenced by herwithdrawal of gaze when Carlo removes his hand. Carlo’s next action of re-moving himself to stand by the caregiver (and, not coincidently, away from

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FIGURE 15 C drops his arm from D,CG withdraws her gaze.

FIGURE 16 C lowers head andstands by CG.

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the other child) speaks very clearly to his orientation as to what her gazepotentially prefigured.

In the next case, I further examine the moment of mutual gaze betweenchild and caregiver as an opportunity for mutual inspection. In contrastwith Case 4, in Case 5, a child’s actions are rather equivocal in showing thathe has entirely given up a potentially sanctionable activity. Then, as a sec-ond point, in the context of early gaze withdrawal by the caregiver, he seeksto resume the activity.

Case 5: Child Equivocally Terminates SanctionableActivity; Resumes After Caregiver’s Look Away

In Case 5, Brian reaches out to take an object (a round wire puzzle)from Joshua but does not actually get a hold of it, and he loses his balanceand stumbles. When he pulls himself up, he looks at the caregiver who isstanding in front of him. The caregiver, having caught sight of the incident,moves her gaze to Brian’s face. The two hold their gaze toward one anotherfor 2.1 sec (Figure 17).

Although Brian is not at that moment engaged in trying to get the ob-ject when the caregiver gazes toward him, her action nonetheless does“double duty”: It is both a disapproving response to his just prior action,and, like Cases 1 and 4 previously, it forecasts that she will take actionshould he try the move again. As with the other cases of the look, what is

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FIGURE 17 CG and Brian (right) hold their gaze towardone another for 2.1 sec.

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being forecasted is highlighted by her other actions. The caregiver, who hasstarted to hold up a shirt to put on another child (blocked from view byBrian), pulls the shirt back and retains it close to her body when she gazesat Brian. Unlike Cases 1 and 4, however, although the caregiver halts hercurrent activity as she gazes, she does so “midcourse.” This makes salientthe relevance of her return to the activity and underscores—possibly evenmore strongly—gazing as the current main activity.

As Brian and the caregiver gaze at one another, the caregiver shifts hergaze to the side (after 2.1 sec), but she does not move her head; she main-tains the position of the shirt, and her look away is brief (.7 sec). In otherwords, in spite of having shifted her gaze, the caregiver maintains the rele-vance of her engagement with Brian. During this brief look way, however,Brian turns back to Joshua and reaches down to try to take the object again.The caregiver moves to intervene.

I suggest two matters here. One is that the effectiveness of a care-giver’s gaze to portend a sanction is at least in part contingent on her hold-ing the gaze until the child can be assessed to have convincingly terminatedan activity lest the child resume it once the caregiver withdraws her gaze asis the case here. A second and related matter is that the child may be takingthe caregiver’s look away as a particularly opportune moment to try the ac-tion again. Indeed, this case points up, as do many cases in the larger dataset, that children’s compliance in halting a sanctionable activity is a tenu-ous matter: That is, children may resume the activity as soon as the care-giver turns her attentions to other matters (Kidwell, 2003). The point here isthat in contrast with this case, in Cases 1 and 4, the caregiver looks away af-ter the children remove their hands from the other child. The children inthese cases, as has been discussed, make visible to the caregiver their cessa-tion of the sanctionable activity and also that they are unlikely to resume it,especially in Case 4. In Case 5, however, although Brian’s arm lingers at hisside as he gazes at the caregiver (and he has taken a small step back fromthe other child), he is still in close proximity to Joshua and within easyreach of the object. In other words, Brian is not doing terminating a possi-ble second attempt to get the object.

As a second matter, Brian, like the children in Cases 1 and 4, holds hisgaze toward the caregiver as she holds her gaze toward him, and he appears“frozen” as he assesses the implications of her gaze.18 The caregiver’s lookaway, however, apparently undercuts the intervention implicativeness ofher actions (the sustained gaze, the pause of a current activity), and Aarontakes the opportunity to attempt to get the object again. A sequential orga-

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nization that is slightly different from that in Cases 1 and 4 is at issue re-garding the caregiver’s early gaze withdrawal:

The lookEvent→[Look to Event→Hold Look→Look Away before child convincingly halts activity→

[put on hold involvement in a current activity→Child Resumes Activity

Thus, in Case 5, although Brian treats the caregiver’s gaze toward himas at first implicating an intervention, and as in the prior cases, he does so ina context of no prior sanction (toward him),19 he subsequently treats herbrief look away as a withdrawal of the intervention threat. Indeed, whenBrian makes a move for the object again, the caregiver intervenes but in away that sanctions Joshua and not Brian. She exhorts Joshua to fend forhimself: “Say No. ( . ) °say no°.” In this way, it seems, Brian has aptly dis-cerned that the caregiver’s gaze withdrawal implicates some lesser conse-quences for him should he make another attempt for the object.

In the final case, a child similarly pursues a line of sanctionable con-duct but in an environment of explicit prior sanctioning by the caregiver. InCase 6, a child exploits a caregiver’s deployment of the look toward him toactually lure her into an intervention.

Case 6: Child Gets the Look, Escalates Activityto Lure Caregiver to Intervene

In Case 6, several children who are drawing with markers are sittingaround a table with the caregiver. Prior to the events that are of interest here,Eathan has been vigorously pounding the marker on the paper to the ac-companiment of very loud vocalizations, and he has been sanctioned twiceby the caregiver. With the second sanction, she threatens to remove themarker from him, going so far as to get up from her seat to go over to take itfrom him. In both cases of sanctioning, Eathan acts defiantly against thecaregiver’s actions. He continues the pounding and vocalizations and thenstops just short of the caregiver actually taking the marker from him.

After being sanctioned twice, Eathan resumes the pounding and vocal-izations again (line 1, Figure 18). Then, he pauses these activities and looksup at the caregiver (lines 2 and 3, Figure 19). The caregiver is in the processof putting a cap back on a pen; it is not possible to tell if she is already look-ing at Eathan or meets his gaze shortly thereafter.

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1 E: UhhhhUUHHhhhhhAAAEEEHHHhh! pounding marker2 ( .1 )

E looks up at CG, CG is putting cap on penX

3 ( . )

As Eathan gazes toward the caregiver, she finishes capping the pen and beginsto lean toward him (line 4 following). When she does this, Eathan resumes thepounding and the vocalization—in other words, now with the caregiver’s fullattentiononhim(line5).Thecaregiverplacesherhandson the table, leans for-ward even more, and begins shaking her head “no” (line 5). She addresses himand reminds him of the prior sanction (line 6; Figure 20 ). From the beginningofthecaregiver’s look/leantowardEathantohersanctioningisabout2.0sec.20

4 ( .7 ) CG looks at E and begins to lean forward5 E: AEHHHHAEHHHHHHHHH [ HHhhh! pounding marker gazing at CG

VCG puts hands on table, leans forward more, shakes head “no”

6 CG: [Eathan! °we talked about ( ) doing something.°

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FIGURE 19

2.0

FIGURE 20

FIGURE 18

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As the caregiver addresses Eathan, he ceases the pounding and looks down.The caregiver continues with a warning (line 8):

6 CG: [ Eathan! °we talked about ( ) doing something.°V

E stops pounding, looks down, and inspects pen

7 ( 1.2)8 CG: Otherwise I need to let you go, I’ll I’ll take the pens back.

As a first point, the caregiver’s sustained gaze toward Eathan, that is,the look, similar to the actions of caregivers discussed in Cases1, 4, and 5, ismade prominent via its relation to other activities that she is involved in: inthis case, putting a cap back on a pen. Moreover, she leans toward Eathanand puts her hands on the table when she has finished. Thus, looking isstarted as a new activity as her prior activity, putting the pen cap back on, isnoticeably terminated. In this way, the look can be seen by Eathan as thecaregiver’s now primary activity, and it becomes an opportunity for him tocarry on in full view the pounding (note his gleeful expressions in Figures19 and 20, discernible even with the poor quality of the frame grabs) andthus to draw the caregiver to pursue an intervention toward him (in thiscase, a threat to remove not just the pen but Eathan himself). Thus, as dis-cussed previously, the intervention that is implicated by a deployment ofthe look by the caregiver is realized as a sequential matter as follows:

The lookEvent→[Look to Event→Hold Look as child continues problem conduct →[Intervene

[halt involvement in a current activity

As a second and final point, Eathan uses the prior sanctions of the care-giver, along with engaging in the pounding in full view of her, to producehis subsequent rendition of the activity as especially provocative. The look,then, is not exclusively an action to be used by caregivers in their efforts atthe social control of children but one that children may, on occasion, use to“turn the tables” on their caregivers.

CONCLUSION

Children’s treatment of caregivers’gazing actions toward them as theyengage in sanctionable activities demonstrates that they have grasped afundamental principle of social life: namely, that being looked at matters.

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Just how it matters, as has been the topic of this article, derives from a num-ber of interactional resources that configure to give children a sense ofwhether or not a particular gazing action by a caregiver portends, or not, anintervention in their activities. In this way, children grasp not only thatcoming under the gaze of their caregivers at certain moments can result ininterventions but more accurately, that coming under certain of their gazesand not others can have such consequences. As such, children confrontwhat may be considered a paradox of sorts with respect to the apparentobservability of their conduct: Even though caregivers may see children’ssanctionable activities, they do not always take action to stop them (cf.Kidwell and Zimmerman, 2005). The contingent nature of caregivers’ in-terventions in children’s activities, then, constitutes a rather permeable or-ganization of enforcement—which, of course, children learn to exploit.This permeability, however, is at least in part visually accessible to chil-dren. That is, children can look to see if they are being looked at by theircaregivers and, as is the issue this paper, how.

Being looked at is a complex communicative matter. The visible char-acter of a gaze and its occurrence relative to a sequence of ongoing events,both with respect to the activities of the caregiver when she produces a gazeand with respect to a larger course of events that are transpiring betweenherself and a child, provides for how children can assess such crucial socialmatters as what another will do next, particularly as this may pertain toone’s own activities. In this regard, the role of gaze in ordering not just thesocial lives of very young children but also adults requires more consider-ation than it has been given by developmental and cognitive psychologists.Thus, although certain mental capacities are no doubt involved in chil-dren’s discernments of caregivers’ gazes being (a) directed to them and (b)directed to a particular aspect of their conduct that they should modify, inthis article, I resituate these capacities with respect to the role they play inthe organization and enactment of human social life (cf. Kidwell andZimmerman, YEAR). I propose here that intentionality, a traditionally psy-chological concept, may be more accurately formulated as what others in-tend to do, and in this way, what others intend to do is most certainly under-stood by children by reference to the design and placement of others’visible action in the ongoing flow of events that surround them and long be-fore they are able to carry on fluent conversations with others about thoseevents.

The gaze of others furnishes children a resource—frequently apart fromtalk in the cases examined here—that permit them to develop responsivecoursesofactionbyreference toothers’actions.This responsivenessenables

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a powerful social control mechanism. Caregivers may manage children notonly by direct intervention, verbal or physical, but with a less intrusivemethod: their gaze. As I have demonstrated, some gazes by caregivers to-ward children enable their self-inspection of and self-action toward the as-pects of their conduct they take to have drawn a caregiver’s gaze, and this isevidenced by how they organize their subsequent conduct. Thus, the broadaim of this article has had to do with how caregivers looking at children andchildren looking at caregivers constitutes a basic interactional resource forboth parties: for caregivers, to contain children’s sanctionable activities andfor children, to curtail or continue them. The specific task of this article hashad todowithdemonstratinghowthe local featuresofagaze, its shapeand itsorderlydeploymentbyreference tootherhappenings,make this so.Thefind-ings I have presented here suggest patterns of gazing behavior both with re-spect to how gaze is deployed and how it is responded to that organizes hu-man conduct apart from the talk of participants. In this way, it is part of adomain of social orderliness that is utterly pervasive, one that bears furtherconsiderationof itsempiricaldetails forhowparticipantssystematically,andrecurrently, organize their conduct in the presence of others.

NOTES

1 I have used the pronoun “she” throughout the article as all of the cases that make up thedata set involve female caregivers.

2 Put another way, these are the sorts of activities that are found at the peripheries of whatGoffman (1963) termed focused interaction, that is, interaction in which there is a com-mon focus of attention and mutually directed action between interactants. Goffman(1963) juxtaposed focused interaction with unfocused interaction, that having do withthe most basic responsiveness of interactants to one another that is occasioned by their“mere and sheer co-presence” (p. 24).

3 In the remaining cases in the subset of 50, caregivers were either off camera, were notlooking at the children, were looking and at the same time or shortly thereafter directingtalk and/or other sort of action toward children (e.g., physically separating them), orwere looking but not in such a way as to be characterized as either a mere look or thelook. Although gazes in this latter category—which, most simply put, are cases of care-givers watching children—bear an interesting analytic relation to gazes of the look vari-ety, it is beyond the scope of this article to offer a detailed comparison. I further addressthis topic in Note 14.

4 Indeed, when this proof criterion is not applied in these 50 cases, the numbers riseslightly: 9 instances of the look and 9 instances of mere looks. Again, one reason thenumber of cases may be on the low side is that although the 50 cases show childrenlooking to caregivers as they engage in sanctionable activities and organizing their ac-

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tivities in a responsive way, the camera view often does not include the caregiver, partic-ularly at those points when the caregiver might be making these gazing actions.

5 These other data sources that were consulted include child–caregiver interactions in sit-uations of children’s nonsanctionable activities (drawn from the original 500 hr), retiredadults sitting around a table and talking and drinking coffee, and adults sitting around atable and talking as they wait for a fourth member to join them so that they can resumetheir game of pictionary.

6 I measured gaze duration for mere looks from shift begin to shift end in this article be-cause they are quick actions and not held toward a target. For the look, however, howlong the gaze is held is noted. Sometimes it is difficult to measure the two in cases of thelook (the duration from shift begin to shift end and how long the gaze is held) as a sepa-rate matter because the caregiver’s gaze is already aimed at the child from shift begin.Durations were calculated with a stopwatch and represent an average of at least threetimings made for a gaze instance. Difficulties obtain in getting an “exact timing” be-cause the point at which a gaze shift begins and the point at which it is held relative tothe caregivers’ other activities is not always precisely clear; rather, it’s a matter of someapproximation.

7 I am not using the term TCU (turn construction unit; Sacks et al. 1974) because speakertransition is not relevant for storybook reading in the same way as for conversation.However, the syntactic units (i.e., words, phrases, and sentences) that comprise the sto-rybook text clearly provide natural boundaries for the transition to other activities: forexample, to be described next, the caregiver’s production of the gazing action the look.

8 The word “idea” projects that another syntactic unit should follow to express what “lit-tle nut brown hare’s” idea is (cf. Lerner, 1991, 1996).

9 It is difficult to tell here precisely what points the caregiver’s gaze is targeting. It ap-pears that her gaze first alights on Heather’s face and then travels to Aaron’s hand andthen down to the book.

10 In contrast with Aaron’s response to the caregiver’s first mere look, it appears that eitherhe does not have access to this look because his focus is intent on Heather and also be-cause the caregiver’s head movement is relatively small compared to that of the firstmere look.

11 It is possible that the caregiver’s sustained gaze plus her stretched lip gesture are factorsthat together contribute to Aaron’s letting go. Cases to be examined subsequently showthat gaze alone, however, accomplishes children’s cessations of sanctionable acts (i.e.,without contributing facial gestures). Thanks to anonymous Reviewer B for this point.

12 The caregiver’s eyes may shift among targets, but the head stays relatively “fixed.”

13 I am not sure what minimum length a gaze should be held to count as an instance of thelook. Of the seven instances, the duration ranges from 1.2 sec to 3.2 sec. It seems that it is acombinationof featuresasdiscussed in thissection thatmakesaparticulargaze the look.

14 Of note, too, in this case is that both types of looks by the caregiver ultimately implicatea possible return of the caregiver’s focus to the central artifact of the reading activity,namely, the book. Specifically, the caregiver’s head and gaze position in the instances of

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a mere look and the look indicate moments of divergent focus relative to the position andactivities of her lower body, especially in the way she continues to hold the book openon her lap. In line with Schegloff’s (1998) notion of “body torque,” the caregiver, viathese divergent orientations of different sectors of her body (although her body is nottorqued per say), maintains different levels of involvement in the two activities: lookingand reading (see also Goodwin, 1986). The child, as an analyst of the caregiver’s looks,then must discriminate which looks are projectably on their way back to the book, whatmay be considered a “home position,” and which ones implicate a more lengthy depar-ture from this position. As Schegloff (1998) noted, when a body part is held in a diver-gent position relative to other activities of the body, a “temporary home position” (p.542) may be established. Such is the case with this instance of the look: The caregiver,in holding her look toward the children, strikes an arrangement whereby from this newlocale, she may projectably move to intervene in the child’s activities or return to the ac-tivity of reading—contingent on whether the child stops his activities.

15 I do not discuss here another sort of gazing action by caregivers: watching. Watching,like the look, is a gazing action that is held for a relatively long duration (again, longenough to show that something is holding the gazer’s attention). However, when watch-ing, the caregiver does not produce this action relative to the stops and starts of anotheractivity that she may be involved in. Sometimes the caregiver is sitting, “doing nothing”as it were, watching children; sometimes she is busy with another activity (e.g., arrang-ing blocks on the floor to set up a block game for children) as she watches. Interestingly,several data examples from the subcollection of 50 show that children, although theylook at the caregiver and therefore see that she is watching them, continue with theirsanctionable activities. The point, then, is that it is the halting of a current activity thatmakes a gazing action, the look, and thus an action that projects a readiness by the care-giver to take interventive action toward the child. Watching is a subject that will have tobe taken up in a future report.

16 Caregivers can be seen halting and transitioning from one activity to another in a varietyof ways. For instance, a caregiver may halt a current activity “midcourse” to attend tothe urgent business of a child’s problem conduct; or she may visibly pause a current ac-tivity, for example, by saying “hold on just a moment” to a child she is reading to; shemay multitask, for example, by continuing a current activity of helping one child get anobject back from another that has resulted in her hand being on the child while shereaches out with the other hand to separate two other disputing children; she may alsonoticeably terminate a current activity (and thus show that she will not return to it) andthen take action toward a child.

17 An issue, of course, is that children, on any number of prior occasions, have likely beensanctioned for this sort of behavior. However, as a locally sequential matter, the child inthis case has not received a prior sanction.

18 The structure of Brian’s activity simply does not permit a more obviously “still en-gaged” with the other child posture that is found in Cases 1 and 4. In these cases, thechildren are pulling or pushing the other child and keep their hands in contact with theother’s body as they gaze at the caregiver; then they remove their hands.

19 Another child tried a few moments prior to take the object from Joshua. The caregiverintervened and first sanctioned Joshua with an aggravated “Joshua?! say NO!,” then to

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the other child, also aggravated, “Did you hear what he said? He said no. ( .1 ) He saidno.” An interesting issue, which is beyond the scope of this article, concerns how theseactions create a context of sanctioning but to another person.

20 Because it is not possible to tell precisely when the caregiver’s gaze alights on Eathan,the duration of their mutual gaze is an approximation here.

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APPENDIX

Transcription/Data Presentation Conventions for Gazing and Em-bodied Actions:

Gazing Actions

These transcription conventions for gazing and other embodied ac-tions have been borrowed from Goodwin (1981); some additions/modifica-tions have been made.

A period “.” or a series of periods “ . . . ”Represents movement of gaze by one participant to another

A “,” or series of commas, “, , ,”Represents movement of gaze away from the target

“X”Marks the arrival of gaze

“x”Marks the arrival at a new target

A line “___”Indicates continued gaze by one participant toward another

Embodied Actions

“V”For actions that are described below lines of talk,“V” marks the

point they occur in relation to talk

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