Disputes about parenting, including investments of time, can arise when families break apart. One such context is that of kinship care, where relatives (typically grandparents or siblings) take over parenting responsibilities for a child. However, little is known about the discursive processes by which ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parental identities are constructed. From a corpus of video–recordings of kinship carer support groups, we examine how time references feature in carers' complaints about birth parents. Using Conversation Analysis, we identify two forms of reference: (i) reference to “child's time”, a shared cultural device concerning children's experience, and (ii) juxtaposing reported events on a timeline to infer consequentiality, thus attributing unparental motives to the birth parent. Both forms of time reference substantiate carers' inferences about birth parents' ineligibility for membership of the “good parent” category, and thus affirm their own entitlement as members, as key actions in the formulation of their complaints. We consider the implications of these findings for understanding co-constructed time-referenced devices such as “child's time”, and how Conversation Analytic studies could usefully investigate what other event-relative devices may be used to accomplish different social actions, and what identities might get constructed in the process.

家庭破裂时，可能会产生有关养育子女的争执，包括时间的投入。这样的情况之一就是亲属照料，亲戚（通常是祖父母或兄弟姐妹）接管孩子的养育责任。但是，关于建立“好”和“坏”父母身份的话语过程知之甚少。从一系列的视频记录中，有亲属照顾者支持小组的视频记录，我们研究了时间参照在照顾者对亲生父母的抱怨中的作用。通过对话分析，我们确定了两种参考形式：（i）提及“孩子的时间”，这是一种与孩子的经历有关的共享文化手段，并且（ii）在时间轴上并列报告的事件以推断出结果，从而将非父母动机归因于出生父母 两种形式的时间参考都可以证明照料者对亲生父母是否有资格成为“好父母”类别的推论，从而肯定了自己作为成员的资格，这是他们提出申诉的关键行动。我们考虑这些发现对于理解诸如“孩子的时间”之类的共同构造的时间参照装置的含义，以及对话分析研究如何能够有效地调查哪些其他与事件相关的装置可用于完成不同的社会行为，以及可能的身份在此过程中得到构建。