How do parents initiate and sustain math-related conversations with preschoolers? Employing conversation analysis to examine parent–child math talk.

Informal math interactions during childhood are related to children's math achievement; thus, there is rising interest in understanding the nature of these interactions. To date, most research on parent-child math talk has used quantitative indicators (e.g., word frequencies) to describe the input children receive. By contrast, the present study took a qualitative approach, using conversation analysis to investigate how parents initiate and sustain conversations during informal math interactions. We examined initiation-response-evaluation sequences within math-related discussions during storybook reading. Transcripts of 41 parents and their children (Mage = 45.76 months, SD = 6.80) in the United States reading a researcher-designed storybook were analyzed. Findings suggest that (a) parents initiate math discussions with various strategies beyond the typical known-answer questions, including the use of proposals and appendor questions, (b) book features shape the nature of the math interactions parents initiate, and (c) parents' strategies to repair children's incorrect responses scaffold math learning by introducing additional information and using multimodal support. These results offer a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of how parents structure math-related conversations and the active role children play in these interactions. They also point to the importance of developing intervention strategies that align with the kinds of naturally occurring conversations in parent-child math talk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).