Infant embodied requests and teacher-practitioner offers during early childhood education mealtimes

The importance of building healthy relationships with food in children ’ s early years is of paramount importance. Building on prior work exploring the social and linguistic practices in infant eating interaction experiences, this research uses a multimodal conversation analysis approach to explore how mealtime interactions are managed as a co-constructed activity between infants (0 – 2 years) and early childhood teacher-practitioners. Here we will explore video data recorded during mealtimes in an early childhood setting in Mid-Wales, where infants orient to recruitments for assistance and teachers provide offers of help with food items throughout the data. Analysis demonstrates 1) infant recruitment of help through embodied ‘showing ’ an item causing a problem in multi-modal ways, initiating joint attention that mobilises an offer from an adult in the shape of ‘do you want me to X ’ and 2) adult initiation of an offer of help in the shape of ‘would you like me to X ’ that are not prompted by infants ‘showing ’ an item. Such practices demonstrate infant social competence in recruiting assistance through multimodal resources, and adult ’ s noticings that help is required and their initiation of provision of assistance. The detailed exploration into the ways in which mealtimes are a collaboratively achieved experience reveals how infants effectively contribute in resourceful ways, and how teacher-practitioner responses frame mealtimes as co-produced activities.


Introduction
Mealtime interactions have been studied in the discipline of conversation analysis since its beginning, providing detailed insight into how cultural family norms are co-produced around food (see Mondada, 2009).Research exploring adult interactions with children during mealtimes using a multimodal conversation analysis approach has gained increasing interest during this time, which can be aligned with the current increase in healthy eating campaigns and policies promoting children's participation and voice in all aspects of their lives (for example, Paterson, 2022).Issues of morality have been found embedded in family mealtime interactions, where family disputes often occur, demonstrating how mealtimes can be a space for the co-production of moral and social orders (Busch, 2012;Hester & Hester, 2010).Directives and requests are also prevalent in family mealtimes, revealing how orientation to healthy eating identities are used by adults to persuade children to eat (van der Heijden et al., 2023).Children's embodied displays of request make relevant offers of assistance from present adults in mealtime interactions, where adult offers are often in response to children displaying a trouble through the embodied action of being still, or '"doing halting"' (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021, p. 158).
Requests for help are intrinsically interwoven with morality, specifically around how much help you ask forhow much help you are obliged to giveand who you turn to for help (Sacks, 1992).In requests for assistance, interlocutors often provide assistance through a normative obligation to respond (Fox & Heinemann, 2021).Influential work in this area by Kendrick and Drew (2016) suggests a continuum of recruitments and offerswhere 'embodied displays of trouble' as recruit assistance are of particular interest here.Three-year-old children have been found to be particularly skilled at requesting help from an adult through embodied action, where it is suggested that '[t]hey begin to systematically engage the adult coparticipant's assistance in solving a problem that just emerged' (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021, p. 158).At three years, children have been found to expect a sequential response to their requests that have 'local, public and moral' properties where they demonstrate an understanding 'not just to expect something to occur but to feel entitled' (Wootton, 2006, p. 194).It is also acknowledged that children's requests can start much earlier -around eighteen monthsthrough embodied resources (Filipi, 2015;Wootton, 1997), which is particularly relevant to the current research where the participating E-mail address: amanda.bateman@bcu.ac.uk.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Appetite journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/appethttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2024.107539Received 2 February 2024; Received in revised form 30 May 2024; Accepted 3 June 2024 infants are of this younger age.Embodied means of communicating requests are demonstrated through pointing at a desired object coupled with gaze to the adult recipient, where infants' rejections of adult offers are also communicated through embodied demonstrations of emotional upset (Filipi, 2009(Filipi, , 2015)).
Such infant embodied actions are taken into account within pedagogical early childhood literature, where teacher-practitioners are encouraged to work towards creating 'achievable tasks' for infants, toddlers and young children in their carewhere, if the task is deemed too difficult and unachievable, they may become frustrated and experience failure, and if the task is not challenging enough they may become bored and learning is paused and/or abandoned (Bateman, 2016).With regards to mealtime interactions, making food accessible to infants not only offers opportunity to give children autonomy over their food choices, but also empowers children to achieve the task of eating independent of adult help.These practical tasks to help support collaborative mealtime experiences are further explored through a conversation analysis approach, where young children have been observed competently retrieving food at the dinner table (Lerner et al., 2011) However, such access to desired food sources are only made available for children if it is within their reach or offered to them.During mealtimes in early childhood settings in the UK, infants' movements are often restricted by highchairs, impacting their ability to assert autonomy over their actions.Therefore, requests for adult assistance at mealtimes is a common occurrence, where exploring the resources for asserting such requests is worthy of further attention, as well as exploring their competencies.
Literature exploring infant competencies in contributing to mealtimes demonstrates the use of lexical and non-lexical utterances, such as 'non-lexical ("mmm," "ooh") or lexical ("this is nice, isn't it?")'(Wiggins, 2019, p. 1) and 'lip-smacks' (Wiggins & Keevallik, 2021a) to reveal how adults might frame eating experiences with infants as positive experiences (Wiggins & Keevallik, 2021b).Baby-led weaning is a current and growing area of practice and research (Brown & Arnott, 2014) where infants are encouraged to self-feed, supporting greater control of infant interactions with food, and opportunities for choosing and tasting new foods (Brown, Wyn Jones & Rowan, 2017).As children have more autonomy over their interactions with food through the baby-led weaning approach, they are able to eat at a pace that suits them and fully engage with the sensorial experience of food, including taste and touch of new and familiar food items (Ibid).Encouraging infants to eat independently marks out their competencies in being able to self-feed, although such practices do not eliminate the need for adult assistance -infants' may still need adult help if unable to manage food independently (Brown, Wyn Jones & Rowan, 2017).
One resource infants use to recruit help has been observed when an object is difficult to manage independently, where they 'show' the object causing trouble to an adult to gain their attention, although adults are often unsure of how to respond: … show-recipients have as their task discerning whether a particular embodied display, in the context of its occurrence, is a show, an offer of an object (a give), or a request (e.g., to do something with the object) to be able to produce an appropriate response.(Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007, p. 593).
Here we explore how infants 'show' an item causing trouble during mealtimes, competently recruiting assistance from adults, and how teacher-practitioner 'show recipients' perform a next action in response.These detailed findings have implications for early childhood education practice as well as family contexts, where insight into specific adult strategies to respond to infants in ways that support interactions with food and feeding are revealed, as well as practical actions for supporting infant agency and autonomy over their eating practices and upholding of children's rights to request, receive and refuse help from adults.

The project: data context and data collection
The aim of the project was to provide examples of everyday infant feeding practices that could offer advice to early childhood practitioners regarding how to support positive eating experiences for infants.
The research questions were: 1) How are infant mealtimes in early childhood settings in Wales framed as positive eating environments?2) How do early childhood teacher-practitioners and infants collaboratively co-construct mealtime interactions?
The findings in this article relate specifically to research question 2. One early childhood setting in Mid-Wales participated in the project.This setting was attached to the owner's home with approximately fifteen children enrolled, including eight children under the age of two years, made up of two boys and six girls.Four early childhood teacherpractitioners were employed, including the owner, where all were females between the ages of 24 and 40 whose qualifications included National Vocational Qualification level 3 childcare and a primary school teaching qualification, with experiences as early childhood practitioners generally being about six years.
At the early childhood centre, mealtimes included breakfast as the children arrived, snack time around 10am and lunch around 12pm.All meals were prepared at home and bought in by the family member when dropping the child off at the centre.The early childhood teacherpractitioners would then reheat the food (if necessary) and place it on plates for the children in the designated kitchen area, serving it to them when they were securely seated around the mealtime table and/or in highchairs.No parents were present other than teacher-practitioners who also happened to be a parent to an attending child.Teacherpractitioners did not eat with the children, which could be observable as an 'institutional' way of conducting mealtimes and different to other settings (particularly in other countries) where teacher-practitioners and children eat together.
Convenient dates for video data collection with participating infants and teacher-practitioners were planned, where the month of April 2023 was chosen for the recordings to commence.The researcher recorded up to 2 h of video and audio data per day in the participating setting over one week.'Morning snack' time and 'lunch time' episodes were recorded, where the early childhood teacher-practitioners took it in turns to wear a wireless microphone whilst being video recorded by the researcher with a hand-held video recorder.A total of 3 h and 43 min of video data were collected.This data collection method allows for a sustained observation of the mealtime interaction that can be watched multiple times when being transcribed and analysed after the event.Brief notes were made at the end of each recording to help start the analytic process.
The researcher reviewed the data multiple times to explore themes that the participants oriented to as important across all mealtime episodes.This approach to data analysis allows for unmotivated looking as an imperative, where repetitive themes emerge from data rather than the researcher applying their own set of categories prior to the analysis (Schegloff, 1996a).As infants' requests for help and adult offers of assistance were evident across the data, episodes of these occurrences were transcribed in detail using conversation analysis transcription conventions developed by Jefferson (2004) (See appendix for conventions used in this article).Increasingly over time, gestures have been included in transcriptions to mark their importance in the ongoing interaction, often with the use of double parenthesis to mark out gestures, and pictures or sketches (Hepburn & Bolden, 2013).
During this rigorous transcription process, significant features of the interaction became visible and informed the analysis, where a reliable representation of each episode -as displayed by the members themselves -was afforded by the transcription and analysis process, therefore providing a reliable and valid representation of events (Ten Have, 2000; A. Bateman Peräkylä, 2004).By transcribing each turn of talk and gesture for each participant 'The CA microanalytic transcription process offers opportunities to investigate how each turn builds on the prior of others to co-create sequences of interaction' (Church et al., 2022, p. 26) in their co-production of the mealtime activity.The more frequently the data is watched the more detailed the analysis can become, and the findings become richer, as transcription and analysis occur simultaneously.To further ensure the reliability and validity of emerging findings, the data, transcriptions and analysis were presented at international data session labs, where members include academics experienced in the area of multimodal conversation analysis, where any omittances or unsubstantiated claims are addressed prior to publication.

Ethics
Prior to data collection, ethical approval for the project was obtained from Swansea University Ethics Committee.Consent from the early childhood setting owner and centre practitioners was then collected by the researcher; consent from family members was organised by the centre owner.It is often the case with this type of research that the participating centre practitioners prefer to hand out the parent information letters and ask for parental consent themselves rather than have the researcher do this, as they have a close relationship with parents and predict that parents will be more likely to ask questions about the research and disclose issues of concern to them than they would to an academic researcher.
There are clear issues with how much children will understand when explaining video collection to infants under two years, and so informed consent with this age group is a contentious issue.To help with ethical issues regarding consent for videoing infants, Rouse (2018) devised a 'matrix' of consent informed by the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) Ethical Code for Early Childhood Researchers (Bertram et al., 2015).Rouse (2018) suggests that the support of present carers is essential in order to ensure ethical video data collection of infants, and so the researcher worked closely with the early childhood teacher-practitioners in this project, as they knew the infants well and planned to inform the researcher if an infant displayed signs of discomfort, where the videoing would then stop.The researcher has many years of experience researching bodily communication and multi-modal gesture, and as such was also knowledgeable in noticing the bodily communication of the infants that demonstrate their assent and dissent (Dockett et al., 2012).
Once the data were collected, the video files were uploaded onto the researcher's institutional laptop which was password protected where only the researcher had access to the recordings.Consent was given by the participants to share video at conferences and in lectures and data workshops, and for sketches to be used in publications.Transcriptions and analysis of the data are now explored here to further understanding about how infants displayed embodied requests of assistance and how teachers performed offers of help.

Analysis: embodied requests for help during mealtimes
The following excerpts detail infant multimodal ways of displaying 'requests for help' during mealtime interactions.Here we see infants 'showing' a food related item to a nearby early childhood teacherpractitioner in an embodied position initiation of interaction, which prompts the teacher to respond in a way that is directly tied to the embodied request (Sacks et al., 1974).Attention is paid to the ways in which the infant displays their request multimodally through gesture, and how the teacher responds verbally with 'do you want me to … ' and gesture, the implications of which will be discussed in the analysis.

'Do you want me to': adult offers in response to infant embodied requests -acceptance
Transcript 1: [Beaker] Lunch time is finishing, and the teacher-practitioner Lauren (LAU) is clearing the eating area.Two infants, Jesse (JJ) and Mali (MLI) are standing at a table with their drink bottles.
This first transcript provides an example of an infant performing an embodied 'showing' of a trouble with opening her water beaker in a way that is aimed towards the present teacher-practitioner, Lauren, through gaze and bodily positioning.The gesture subsequently prompts Lauren to offer help with opening the beaker in her response, shaping her turn verbally with 'do you want me to … ' and an embodied action of holding her hand out, palm up for receipt of the item.The infant accepts this offer by lifting her beaker towards the teacher's open palm.The teacher flips the spout of the beaker open whilst the infant holds the outstretched beaker, then the infant completes the interaction by drinking from the spout.
The early childhood teacher-practitioner (Lauren) positioned herself in a crouched position next to both infants as she wiped tables and cleared away plates, asking 'okay' to Jesse and 'alright' to Mali.This physical participation framework (Goffman, 1981) provided an opportunity for Mali to communicate a problem that she was currently encountering, where she oriented to the beaker in a way that made it the central point of interest for subsequent mutual engagement by all participants (Goffman, 1961(Goffman, , 1963)).Mali achieved this by placing the beaker in the line of sight of all three present members, as she lifted it onto the table, where its positioning afforded the correct height for Mali to use her body to demonstrate 'struggling to lift the spout' on the item (Fig. 1).Mali used her body torque -hunching over the beaker with hands tightly clasped around its lid and fingers plucking at the stubborn spout -and gaze towards Lauren, communicating the trouble to Lauren multimodally (Goodwin, 2006;Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004).
Mali's actions here can be seen as initiating a request for assistance through embodied gesture, as her 'visible bodily actions expose the trouble, making it publicly available, and thereby provide an occasion for [Lauren] to assist [her], voluntarily' (Kendrick & Drew, 2016, p. 9).This observation of a bodily display of request for assistance aligns with prior research with older children aged three years (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021), where a performed action was observed to prompt adult responses in the form of offers of assistance.This type of adult response is also visible in this data with infant aged children, where Lauren's assistance was shaped in the verbal utterance 'do you want me to open it' (line 15), placing her hand out, palm up, waiting in this position for 1.8 s (line 18).This response not only offered a remedy for a problem (Curl, 2006), but also modelled for Mali how to formulate and communicate the problem 'needing assistance to open the spout of the beaker' through a verbal medium (Burdelski & Howard, 2020).Confirmation that the teacher's response to the 'showing' as a request for help to lift the spout up was indeed the correct one (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007) is then demonstrated by Mali in her receipt of the beaker where she lifted the beaker to her face and placed the now open spout into her mouth, taking a big drink (line 21).
Transcript 2: [Help with a fork] As with Transcript 1, the following transcript demonstrates how infants can recruit assistance with mealtime artifacts through embodied displays, prompting an offer of assistance from the teacher-practitioner with 'do you want me to … '.In this episode, Lauren is sitting to the right of two highchairs, where Mali [MLI] and Aisha [ASA] are sitting.They are finishing their meals with very little food remaining on their plates and highchair trays.As the infants are strapped into highchairs here, embodied requests for assistance such as the use of body torque observed in Transcript 1 become restricted, as the infants are somewhat immobilised.
This sequence was initiated by Aisha where, like Mila in Transcript 1, she 'showed' her fork to a present teacher-practitioner (Lauren), A. Bateman although this time there was no orientation to the object causing trouble, other than it could possibly be surplus to requirements in its use for successfully completing eating lunch.Aisha initiated this sequence by first holding out the spoon with an outstretched arm at the eye level of Lauren, making it a central point of interest within the current participation framework (Goffman, 1961(Goffman, , 1963)).Along with her outstretched arm, Aisha pushed her body forward in her highchair towards Lauren's direction and looked directly at Lauren.Lauren responds by taking the spoon out of Aisha's hand.
Aisha then moved her fork to her 'giving' hand nearest to Lauren, and held it out towards Lauren, but this time with a slightly bent arm, no body propulsion forward or gaze towards Lauren.The differentiation in actions was notable in Lauren's response, as she did not immediately take the fork away.Instead, Aisha sat with her fork poised towards Lauren whilst she continued picking food off her highchair tray with the fingers of her other free hand for 17.8 s.Such 'delayed grantings' of assistance are observable through side sequences that involve further inspection of the situation prior to offering help (Fox & Heinemann, 2021, p. 30) and confirms that a show-recipient's response to a 'showing' can be difficult to discern (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007).The possible temporal delay in the offer of help demonstrates the complexity associated with children's 'showing' of an object in relation to what next action could be performed by the show recipient (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007).
In this 17.8 s timeframe, we see side sequences by Lauren as she commends the infants on their independent feeding with '$well done.$you eaten it all up?$' (line 11) including emotional display as she smiles.Lauren's contingently organised response to the show was then prompted by Aisha's gaze (line 12) (Fig. 2) that was actioned immediately prior to Lauren's offer (line 12).Lauren responded in a way which offered assistance verbally 'd'you want some help |with your + fork¿ shall I scoop it all up for you.' and through gesture as she scooped the remaining food up with the fork (line 14).As with Transcript 1, we can see how Lauren and Aisha's actions build on each prior turn, A. Bateman collaboratively co-constructing the mealtime activity through verbal and embodied actions.

'Do you want me to': adult initiating offersinfant rejection and resistance
Transcript 3: [Beaker 2] In slight contrast to Transcripts 1 and 2, the following two transcripts (Transcripts 3 and 4) demonstrate that offers of assistance can also be declined (Transcript 3) and resisted (Transcript 4), where the infant's right to decline an offer of help is accepted by the teacher, demonstrating active listening to the infants and valuing the choices that they make around mealtimes.
Early childhood teacher-practitioner Lauren (LAU) is sitting on a chair next to infants Jesse (JJ) and Mali (MLI) in their highchairs.Mali and Jesse have their drink beakers available but no food yet.Billy (BLY), also an infant in a highchair, is sitting near to them out of camera shot.
As we observed in Transcript 1, Mali once again had trouble lifting the spout on her beaker and so was unable to drink.She demonstrated this trouble again through embodied means, plucking at the beaker spout and then showing the beaker to Lauren by positioning it in Lauren's line of vision, with her gaze to Lauren and positioning her body over the beaker (lines 03-04).Lauren responded to this 'show' as a communication of request for assistance, immediately verbalising the problem as with Transcripts 1 and 2 'do you want me to help you?', with emphasis on the word 'help' and standing up.Mali responded to this offer by releasing her hands around the beaker and sitting back in her highchair, disengaging with the beaker, making it available for other  hands, as she 'displays a preparedness to take it' in an expectation that the adult will sequentially provide the help' (Wootton, 1994, p. 560).Lauren lifted the beaker spout before sliding the beaker back to Mali and sitting back in her seat.Mali's gestures worked here as an initiation of a request for assistance 'making relevant the provision of assistance' (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021, p. 158) in response by Lauren, recruited by Mali's gaze and body torque as she 'showed' the beaker to Lauren.
Somewhat tied to Mali's drink request, Billy, another infant in a highchair, verbally announced a trouble 'juice:.',pointing (out of camera shot) to a beaker that was laying on the floor next to his highchair.Lauren demonstrated her obligation to provide help (Fox & Heinemann, 2021) in her role as early childhood teacher-practitioner, as equally apparent for Billy as it was for Mila, with her offer 'do you want me to get yours for you:¿' again verbalising the embodied trouble for the children (Burdelski & Howard, 2020).However, when Lauren held the retrieved beaker toward Billy, he responded to the offer with a distressed non-lexical sound (line 16), marking rejection of the offer through a display of emotional distress including verbalisation (Filipi, 2009(Filipi, , 2015)).This prompted Lauren to treat his emotional distress response as a rejection, both verbally 'you don't want it¿' (line 17) and with gesture, as she withdrew the beaker from Billy, placing it on a table (line 18) as a third position repair to the offer of an unwanted object and its rejection (Wootton, 1994).Lauren's acceptance of Billy's choice to refuse the beaker completes the interaction, once again modelling a socially correct response to the situationif you don't want something that is offered to you, you say 'no thank you'.What is particularly interesting here is that Lauren speaks in Welsh, the home language of Wales where the research was carried out, as she says 'no thank you' in Welsh 'dim diolch' to add further learning opportunities (the Welsh for 'thank you) to the pedagogical interaction in the mealtime space.As with the prior transcripts, Lauren's sequential placement of this phrase in the ongoing interaction demonstrated to the children how it is to be used following a specific action (here, to refuse an offer).
The infant's rejection of the offer here could be that the pointing to an object (rather than the 'showing' of an object) and verbalisation of 'juice:.' was misunderstood as a request (Filipi, 2009;Wootton, 1994) to retrieve the beaker, framing the offer of assistance as inadequate, again demonstrating the complexities involved in deciphering a correct response to a 'showing' (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007).Importantly, even though this rejection of an offer could slow down the progressivity of the mealtime activity, Lauren still takes the time to model language use through her placement of 'thank you' in culturally sensitive ways, through the medium of Welsh.
Excerpt 4: [Yoghurt pasta] So far, the excerpts have demonstrated how infants recruit assistance by initiating an interaction with a teacher-practitioner in embodied ways tied to and performed in relation to mealtime artifacts.There has also been exploration of how the teacher responds to these requests with 'Do you want me to … ', verbalising the infants' embodied action in a way that models sequential placement of language.The interactions also show how such offers of assistance are then accepted in a confirmation that the showing of the mealtime artifact was a request for assistance (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007) and in one instance (transcript 3) rejected.
In the following interaction we see how inactivity in the mealtime activity, marked by Finlay displaying stillness, or 'doing halting' (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021, p. 158) is oriented to by Lauren as a request for assistance.However, we will see that Lauren's mobilisation of an offer of assistance in the usual 'Do you want me to … ' is not taken up by Finlay initially, and resisted as he holds on to the spoon that Lauren tries to coax out of his hand.This delay in acceptance of an offer of assistance could be due to no prior turn marking trouble by Finlayindicating that A. Bateman an offer of help in the form of 'Do you want … ' is specifically a responsive action that is only accepted when tied to an initiating request for help.
Early childhood teacher-practitioner Lauren (LAU) is sitting with a group of children and a second teacher (TCH) during lunch.Older children are seated around small tables, and infants (including Finlay (FIN)) are strapped into highchairs that are placed around the tables.Finlay has been sitting without eating for some time.Lauren looks toward him and offers help.
This interaction began with Lauren's verbal noticing of Finlay's A. Bateman inactivity (line 01), as she physically moved herself toward Finlay and offered him help, where moving her body toward Finlay indicated physical help being mobilised.Finlay's embodied stillness, or 'doing halting' (Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021, p. 158) suggested some 'projected trouble' where his lack of eating during a mealtime activity displayed a problem that solicited assistance (Kendrick & Drew, 2016).Lauren's use of the usual offer format 'do you want Lala help you:?' was met with resistance, unlike the first excerpts explored, as she attempted to coax the spoon out of Finlay's hand and he held tightly onto it.Spoons can be observable as important artifact in infant mealtimes, particularly in adult spoon-feeding episodes, where the 'owner' of the spoon has control over using it to transition food from a plate/bowl into a receptive mouth (Wootton, 1994).Here, Finlay's grip on the spoon displayed his resistance in transfer of the spoon to Lauren.It is possible that, as Finlay has not requested assistance in the prior embodied display observable in the transcripts so far, Lauren's 'Do you want … ' format (so far produced as a response) is not relevant or accepted as an initiating first action here.
Only with some coaxing did Finlay release his spoon to Lauren (line 12).Lauren then demonstrated a physical offer of the food, as she scooped up yoghurt and tentatively held the spoon in front of Finlay's face, pausing, and leaving Finlay to retrieve the food if/when he was ready.This action framed Finlay as competent and capable in making decisions in collaborating in the feeding interaction.Finlay's then observably propelled his body forward to meet the distance of the spoon, showing his willingness to eat the yoghurt and his acceptance of this offer of assistance.These actions demonstrated that the spoon feeding executed in this way, was a collaborative action that afforded some control by the child (Wootton, 1994).Taking time to co-achieve this spoon-feeding interaction in this way is essential in maintaining a collaborative mealtime experience without pressure to eat quickly in a limited timeframe.
Lauren again commends the infants' contributions to the mealtime interaction, with assessments 'good (0.5) bo:y.' (line 24) and 'well done.' (line 32) when Finlay eats, and with humour as Lauren declared '>got< a bit of pasta in ere too boy.' (line 26) mobilising the incongruity of mixing pasta with yoghurt, prompting laughter from others present.Another resource that Lauren used to mark out the infant's collaboration in the mealtime event was the use of a 'gustatory receipt mmmm' (line 17) (Wiggins, 2019).Confirming findings by Wiggins (2019) of infant feeding interactions in Scotland, here we see how the adult produced 'mmmm' at the point of interaction when the infant's mouth closed around the spoon, where Finlay would have begun to taste the food.As such, the overall framing of the mealtime experience as essentially a collaborative project was made salient.

'Would you like me to': adult initiating offers of assistanceresistance
Transcript 5: [JJ yoghurt] As suggested so far, 'Do you want me to … ' was accepted as a sequential response turn to a contingent initiating embodied request for help by an infant during mealtimes.In Transcript 4 this argument was further explored through an example of an infant resisting the 'Do you want me to … ' offer of assistance when it was positioned as an initiating turn.We now develop this idea further through providing an example of the teacher-practitioner (Lauren) adapting the shape of her offer to an initiation through 'Would you like me to … ', with no prior infant initiation of a request apparent.
Lauren sitting with a group of children at lunchtime with Jesse (JJ) to her right in his highchair.He is holding a yoghurt tube, pulling at one end of it as he attempts to open it.
Lauren initiated her offer of assistance while Jesse was sitting quite content in his highchair, feeding himself pasta and inspecting his tube of yoghurt.As with Transcript 4, no trouble or any other initiating request move was shown by Jesse.Lauren initiated the sequence by giving an offer of assistance in the form of 'would you like me to' offering help in a verbal utterance and through gesture as she held her hand out, palm up, ready to receive the yoghurt tube.Jesse did not accept this offer though and continued tugging the end of the tube, holding it close to his body with his gaze fixed on the yoghurt.As there was no uptake from Lauren's offer, she withdrew her hand, giving Jesse time to continue exploring his yoghurt, demonstrating that adult offers can be initiated through an observed 'struggling', but that infants do not have to accept an offer of assistance when they have not explicitly requested it.

'Would you like me to' adult initiation and 'do you want me to' adult response
Transcript 6: [3 yoghurts] In the final transcript, we see not only Lauren offering help in the shape of 'Would you like … ' as an initiation of the interaction (lines 1 and 46) but also how an infant showing an item prompts Lauren's offer 'Do you want … ' response turn (lines 20-22; 37-38).The interaction includes both types of sequence to demonstrate the contingent shaping of the offers of help in one final episode.
The early childhood teacher Lauren (LAU) is sitting on a chair next to the highchairs.Older children are present on a nearby table, including the child (CH) who speaks on lines 10, 13 and 21.An older child carries Mali's (MLI) lunch into the room and gives it to Lauren.Lauren takes the plate of food -which has a yoghurt balanced on the plate -to Mali, and Mali immediately lifts the yoghurt off the plate towards her body, with no 'show' of trouble to Lauren.Lauren immediately initiates an offer of assistance shaped as 'Would you like me to … ' (line 01).This contrasts with Lauren's subsequent 'Do you want me to … ' turn that demonstrates a systematic response to an infant initial showing of a food item (lines 20-22).
Immediately, in overlap with Mali lifting her yoghurt off her plate, Lauren initiated an offer of help with 'would you like me to open it?'.(line 01).Even though this might seem presumptive that Mali would be unable to open the yoghurt herself, offering help without even letting her try, as Mali's teacher-practitioner, Lauren's action demonstrated her A. Bateman knowledge regarding Mali's capabilities -what she needed assistance with and what she could do independently.In relation to teachers providing opportunities for children to engage in 'achievable tasks' (Bateman, 2016) Lauren's immediate offer of help here promotes the empowerment of the infant where, rather than taking the yoghurt off Mali immediately, Lauren waited in crouched position with her hand open and available to receive the pot when Mali was ready.As such, Lauren's initiating offer of assistance allowed Mali to choose if and when she accepted the help or not.
Lauren's second follow up offer 'Lala [open it?'(line 06) was overlapped by Mali lifting the pot up to Lauren, suggesting an acceptance of the offer of assistance.It is important to note here, that only when Mali gave the pot to Lauren did Lauren take the lid off, making this a collaborative achievement executed in a timeframe that suited both participants.As Mali spooned the yoghurt into her mouth, Lauren once again marks out the infants' contribution to the eating activity, as she offers a sequence of four 'lip-smacks' sounds (line 16) again as the infant's mouth closed around the spoon (Wiggins & Keevallik, 2021b).
From line 17, a sequence of 'shows' was visible, the first where Mali showed Lauren her spoon (now empty of yoghurt) (line 17), to which Lauren responded as a simple receipt of the show rather than a request for help, as no trouble was displayed.Jesse then showed his yoghurt tube to Lauren, which she did treat as a request for help, demonstrated in her next turn offer 'do you want me to open it?'taking the yoghurt off Jesse and opening it for him.The different responses to the showing of mealtime artifacts here, within a few seconds of each other, demonstrate how the offers of assistance 'would you like me to … ' and 'do you want me to … ' were recipient designed in either an initiating or responsive offer, contingent on whether a prior infant embodied recruitment of assistance was performed or not.

Discussion
The explored episodes have offered insight into real-life mealtime interactions between early childhood teacher-practitioners and infants, revealing how interactions around food in the early years are managed as a collaborative event between all parties.As such, this work builds on prior research exploring the co-construction of mealtimes where child and infant contributions are essential to consider (Busch, 2012;Hester & Hester, 2010;van der Heijden et al., 2023;Wiggins, 2019;Wiggins & Keevallik, 2021a, 2021b).Most noticeably, the analysis has demonstrated how 1) infants employ embodied resources to show a request for assistance during mealtimes, 2) how teacher-practitioners shape their offers as a response to these embodied displays, or initiate offers to pre-empt difficulties, and 3) how these turns at talk and gesture intertwine to co-produce a collaborative mealtime event.The findings therefore also extends prior research exploring requests and offers through a conversation analysis approach (Fox & Heinemann, 2021;Kendrick & Drew, 2016) by demonstrating how these actions are performed by infants through embodied actions (Filipi, 2009(Filipi, , 2015;;Pfeiffer & Anna, 2021;Wootton, 1997), In relation to infants' embodied request for assistance during mealtimes, the examples provided demonstrate how the infants do this in everyday interactions.Mealtime artifacts are performed upon to successfully recruit assistance in embodied ways, notable here in the form of 'showing' a specific item requiring assistance.As such, the mealtime interactions presented here build on findings from Kidwell and Zimmerman (2007) on the sequential organisation of 'showing' an object (p.596) where we also observed: (1) Child shows object (thereby designating another as a showrecipient).
(3) Child treats response as adequate, or not.
Building on this prior work, the competencies of infants to recruit assistance in embodied wayshere around mealtime artifacts -was demonstrated through the use of a multimodal conversation analysis approach, where the detailed transcription and analysis process reveals the contingent structure of adult offers, and the subsequent infant responses that either accept, reject or resist the adult offer.
Such a rigorous exploration of everyday mealtimes with infants and their teacher-practitioners provides further insight in how teacher offers of assistance can be shaped as initiating or responsive offers that are contingent on the infant's prior action.Here, the teacher was observed offering assistance and then waiting for the infant response prior to any subsequent action, positioning infants as competent and capable of accepting, resisting or rejecting an offer.These actions are sequentially different to giving infants assistance in an immediate response to a displayed trouble, without the go ahead from the infant interlocutor, which can often be the case in the busyness of early childhood education.The findings related to teacher-practitioner offers of assistance that are finely tuned to each infant's needs here adds to the growing body of literature that demonstrates how adults support young children's independent feeding (e.g., baby-led weaning, Brown & Arnott, 2014;Brown, Wyn Jones & Rowan, 2017).By carefully attending to the needs of each infant, shaping offers in contextually relevant ways, mealtimes and interactions with food can encourage infants to grow healthy relationships with food and eating.

Strengths and limitations
This study exploring infant mealtimes in early childhood education included a small number of participants, limiting the generalisability of the findings to other contexts.However, the detailed and rigorous analysis allowed a deep exploration of the data offering a thorough investigation into the collected video recordings.

Conclusion
Mealtimes in early childhood settings provide valuable sites for practicing and trying out experiences associated with food.In practical terms, real-life examples of teacher-practitioner strategies for facilitating collaborative eating experiences through responding to infant embodied displays of requests for help were demonstrable.The usefulness of a multimodal conversation analysis approach for revealing infant participation in the feeding activity is shown, offering insight into strategies for early childhood teacher-practitioners to notice, recognize and respond to infants' individual needs in ways that support collaborative interactions with food.Teacher-practitioners are observed empowering infants to try to master achievable tasks, especially regarding practical actions for supporting infant agency and autonomy over their eating practices, upholding children's rights to request, receive and refuse help from adults, at their own pace.For infant eating practices, this article has explored how mealtimes are collaborative events, and offered some thought regarding children's acceptance, rejection and resistance to adult offers of help during interactions with food.

Future directions
The mealtimes co-constructed here encouraged infants to contribute to the eating activity, where the adult respected the infants' right to be autonomous in their actions intertwined with progressivity at a pace that suits all participants.These actions create space for children to become autonomous in mastering feeding themselves, as promoted in the baby-led weaning approach (Brown & Arnott, 2014;Brown, Wyn Jones & Rowan, 2017).It is suggested here that future research could explore baby-led weaning in more detail using a multimodal conversation analysis approach to reveal the adult role in such mealtime occurrences.As temporal constructs, mealtime contexts offer opportunities for also exploring the contemporary early childhood concept of 'slow pedagogy' and specifically slow mealtimes (Clark, 2023a;2023b).Future research could demonstrate how slow mealtimes might be collaboratively achieved through the use of a multimodal conversation analysis approach.

Declaration of competing interest
None.
Underscore marks an emphasis placed on the underscored sound.
A. Bateman