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In this paper, I analyse women’s interview narratives from the United States and Japan about their child rearing experiences to examine how stance-taking towards their experiences and their family members manifest itself differently. Paying attention to the narratives regarding their husbands’ role in child rearing, I examine how stance-taking may be perceived through overt and implied references in the use of linguistic resources. With the American English data, I discuss how the shift of personal pronouns combined with the discourse marker but create metaframes of the speakers’ stances, categorized as “abstract/positive” and “concrete/negative.” In contrast, Japanese narratives revealed that women’s stance-taking towards their husbands was marked through the concurrent usage of supportive giving verbs (-te kureru), indexing indebtedness on the side of the women, as well as nominalization forms that categorized their partners as certain types of men based on shared social expectations.