Answering questions instead of telling stories: Everyday breaching in a family meal

•Children's use of ‘everyday’ breaching.•‘Everyday’ breaching involves adjacency pair organization and preference organization.•‘Everyday’ breaching comprises a method for avoiding telling a story.

In this article, an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach is used to analyze an instance of a child's everyday breaching as a devise for avoiding engagement in a story telling of the day's news. An analysis is presented which seeks to elucidate (a) some of the methodical practices which are used to produce and constitute the everyday breaching and (b) the child's parents’ analysis of this verbal play as breaching conventional conversational sequential and categorial structures. It is argued that such a fine-grained analysis of seemingly minor breaches can contribute to our understanding of the way that various types of adult/teenager relationships can be constituted via such ‘troublesome’ interactions.