Resisting the incitement to talk in child counselling: aspects of the utterance `I don't know'

Data from naturally occurring child counselling sessions are used to explore how counsellors seek to elicit therapeutically relevant talk in the face of resistance, or non-cooperation, from children. Focusing on a case in which a 6-year-old child persistently avoids collaborating in the kind of counselling talk that the counsellor is evidently aiming to produce, the analysis focuses both on the child's resistance strategies and on the counsellor's techniques for attempting to combat resistance and work towards a therapeutically relevant outcome. The article makes a contribution both to our understanding of the social and communicative competencies of children, especially in institutional settings, and to our understanding of the practices, discursive techniques and competencies of child counsellors.