Extract 4
1 Clare: well uh- (.) my children just to gain a bit
2 of perspective here are twenty (.) nineteen (.)
3 sixteen- ahh nearly sixteen and four teen
4 (0.2) so i have four uh=
5 Roch: =£so y- so you’re through it no(hh)w↑£
In extract 4, Clare lists her children’s ages (lines 2-3) before confirming how many children she has (line 4). As with Rachel in extract 3, the ‘how many-how old’ manoeuvre underscores Claire’s experiential expertise. The same manoeuvre is also evident in Extract 2 where Christine states “i’ve got three children >twenty-one nineteenfifteen <” (lines 8-9).
By the common-sense inference that a mother’s job is to raise her children (Mackenzie, 2018), this credentialing of ‘how many-how old’ serves as a metric by which members both construct and position themselves within an emergent category of Mother-cum-Expert . In the example above, Clare’s interactional achievement is indicated as host Rochelle infers a success story, whereby Clare is ”through it now” (line 5). In our data, where mothers are engaged in stance taking around issues of children and family life, motherhood is constructed by recourse to this interactional manoeuvre which marks them out as ‘mother of x -many children (of x ages)’ and thereby serves to qualify and quantify the extent of one’s expertise. Across the 18 debates analysed, the how many-how old manoeuvre is used on 10 occasions by participants evidencing their own credentials, and a further six times by hosts to credential participants.