FROM SURRENDER STORIES TO PERSISTENCE STORIES: YOUNG GIRLS' NARRATIVES OF AGENCY AND POWER IN CHILD-PARENT CONFLICTS

This paper examines the dynamics of agency and power as revealed in young girls' fictional narratives about child-parent conflicts that are caused by incompatibility between the goals of children and parents in everyday family life. The data were collected from 26 girls aged 4 to 6 using the Story Magician's Play Time method. Narrative analysis yielded five types: mediation and compromise stories, surrender stories, persistence stories, solidarity stories, and standoff stories. In the girls' stories, agency and power were multifaceted and variable phenomena that were negotiated in a relational context in which the gender of the child and parent characters played an important role. Power relations tended to be narrated as more hierarchical and immutable in child-father conflicts, and more often as negotiated in child-mother conflicts. However, when narrated as deploying unyielding and tactical actions, the child characters were only able to exert power over the parent in girl-mother conflicts. Thus, some stories conveyed a clear, hierarchical generational order while others demonstrated children's agentic power to reshape adult dominance in child-adult conflicts in diverse ways. The practical implications of the findings are also discussed.