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This article shows how the observation of children at the margins of interviews provides a particularly useful material for revealing the social differentiation of families’ educational practices. Based on a survey conducted in 18 families on the appropriation of Montessori games, it questions the conditions of the sociologist’s reception by the surveyed, the enrolment of children in the situation of ethnographic investigation and the circumstances surrounding the interview set-up by demonstrating that far from constituting a condition for the completion of the survey and a necessary prerequisite for the effective recording of the material, these methodological margins of interviews offer a material to be analysed in itself.