Securing child compliance during moments of conflict presents a constant challenge that parents face on a routine basis and has been an important theme in parent-child interaction research (Goodwin & Cekaite 2018). Conflict may arise when the parent thwarts the child’s desire, rejects the child’s request, or when the child resists the parent’s demand for the target action, e.g. brushing teeth. Existing research on negotiation in parent-child interaction has focused on parental practices in the face of the child’s initial non-compliance, such as downgrading and/or upgrading of directives, e.g. using threats (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011). Drawing on and expanding this line of research, the current study examines sequences of distressing incidents where the child expresses his/her distress at the thwarted trajectory of his/her projected action, and how parents subsequently respond to these. Close sequential analysis reveals that parents’ subsequent move involves two aspects: providing rational grounds for their action; and addressing the emotional state of the child. More specifically, parents provide accounts/grounds to justify their action, i.e., non-grant, and at times respond/non-respond to the child’s grumpy accusation of the parent as “bad/naughty”. Accounts provided by the parent include invoking family rules, reminding the child of future reward, or reminiscing about past experience, which is tied to the child’s identity as a ‘good boy/good girl’. Interestingly, this parental strategy of identity attribution parallels that used by the child in expressing his/her distress by calling the parent “bad/naughty”. The study suggests a close link between moral predicates and emotion and discusses how these are oriented to in action negotiation sequences in parent-child interaction. The data for the current study are comprised of 34 hours of video recording of parent-child interaction collected from four bilingual families within a home setting, involving at least one child (2 – 4 years old) and his/her parent.