This article investigates parental speech acts of control and metapragmatic comments, as issued from parents to children in dinnertable conversations in middle-class Israeli, American and American immigrant families. Family discourse is essentially polite, enacted in domain- and culturally specific ways, and centered around three key notions: power, informality and affect. Given the culturally varied perceptions of children's face needs, Israeli parents rely heavily on the emotively colored language of mitigation and nicknaming, whilst American parents emphasize the child's independence by adherence to first names and the use of conventional forms. As to differences in aspects of pragmatic socialization, all parents attempt to socialize children towards adherence to Gricean norms of conversation, but American parents explicitly teach rules of conversational management, whilst Israeli parents worry about correct language use. Three general implications are drawn for a general politeness theory: a need to incorporate the hitherto neglected dimension of speech-events as a determinant factor in evaluating politeness values; the reassessment of the relative importance granted different strategic dimensions in indexing politeness; and the broadening of the scope of pragmatic phenomena studied for politeness to wider discourse phenomena, such as discourse management.