Early parenting is one of the strongest predictors of child well-being. Online social communities have shown promise in supporting parents across a range of contexts. However, we only have a limited understanding of how posters and commenters interact within a forum, or how well commenter responses can support complex parenting questions, such as attempts to change a child's behaviour or to apply new parenting approaches. We start addressing this gap by combining an empirical analysis of 1 year of parent posts from an exemplar online forum (Mumsnet) with literature on parenting interventions from psychology. In particular, we examine the types of question parents of 2-5 year olds seek help for around their children's behaviour, and the challenges with the support that they do (or do not) receive from the Mumsnet community. Combining empirical and theory-driven insights, we outline an 'information-to-application' gap that conceptually underpins the difficulties observed, and suggest plausible research directions that could address such design problems.

Parenting practices have a profound effect on children's well-being and are a core target of several psychological interventions for child mental health. However, there is only limited understanding in HCI so far about how to design socio-technical systems that could support positive shifts in parent-child social practices in situ. This paper focuses on parental socialisation of emotion as an exemplar context in which to explore this question. We present a two-step study, combining theory-driven identification of plausible design directions with co-design workshops with 22 parents of children aged 6-10 years. Our data suggest the potential for technology-enabled systems that aim to facilitate positive changes in parent-child social practices in situ, and highlight a number of plausible design directions to explore in future work.

There is a growing interest in human-computer interaction (HCI) to envision, design, and evaluate technology-enabled interventions that support users’ emotion regulation. This interest stems in part from increased recognition that the ability to regulate emotions is critical to mental health, and that a lack of effective emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor for mental illness. However, the potential to combine innovative HCI designs with the theoretical grounding and state-of-the-art interventions from psychology has yet to be fully realised. In this article, we synthesise HCI work on emotion regulation interventions and propose a three-part framework to guide technology designers in making: (i) theory-informed decisions about intervention targets; (ii) strategic decisions regarding the technology-enabled intervention mechanisms to be included in the system; and (iii) practical decisions around previous implementations of the selected intervention components. We show how this framework can both systematise HCI work to date and suggest a research agenda for future work.

The ability to manage emotions effectively is critical to healthy psychological and social development in youth. Prior work has focused on investigating the design of mental health technologies for this population, yet it is still unclear how to help them cope with emotionally difficult situations in-the-moment. In this paper, we aim to explore the appropriation, naturally emerging engagement patterns, and perceived psychological impact of an exemplar interactive tangible device intervention designed to provide in-situ support, when deployed with n=109 youth for 1.5 months. Our findings from semi-structured interviews and co-design workshops with a subset of participants (n=44 and n=25, respectively) suggest the potential of using technology-enabled objects to aid with down-regulation and self-compassion in moments of heightened emotion, to facilitate the practice of cognitive strategies, and to act as emotional companions. Lastly, we discuss design opportunities for integrating situated and embodied support in mental health interventions for youth.

Emotion-related parent-child interactions during early childhood play a crucial role in the development of emotion regulation, a fundamental life skill central to well-being. However, limited work in HCI has explored how technology could support parents in adopting supportive emotion socialisation practices. In this paper, we explore how an embodied, in-situ intervention in the form of a smart toy can impact emotion-related parent-child interactions in the home. We draw on (1) interviews with 29 parents of young children who had the smart toy for at least 1 month; (2) co-design workshops with 12 parents and 8 parenting course facilitators. We discuss how the smart toy impacted parent-child interactions around emotions for a subset of families, and draw on workshop data to explore how this could be designed for directly. Finally, we propose a set of design directions for technology-enabled systems aiming to elicit and scaffold specific parent-child interactions over time.

We present a Research-through-Design case study of the design and development of an intimate-space tangible device perhaps best understood as a socially assistive robot, aimed at scaffolding children’s efforts at emotional regulation. This case study covers the initial research device development, as well as knowledge transfer to a product development company toward translating the research into a workable commercial product that could also serve as a robust “research product” for field trials. Key contributions to the literature include: (1) sharing of lessons learned from the knowledge transfer process that can be useful to others interested in developing robust products (whether commercial or research) that preserve design values, while allowing for large scale deployment and research; (2) articulation of a design space in HCI/HRI (Human Robot Interaction) of intimate space socially assistive robots , with the current artifact as a central exemplar, contextualized alongside other related HRI artifacts.

Interventions that help children develop protective factors against mental health disorders are an inherently social endeavour, relying on a number of actors from within the family as well as the school context. Little work thus far in CSCW and HCI has examined the potential of technology to support or enhance such interventions. This paper provides the first steps to unpacking this socio-technical design space, focusing on emotional regulation (ER) as a specific instance of a protective factor. We combine a user-centred approach to understanding lived experiences of families (interviews, design workshops) with an expert-led understanding of what makes interventions psychologically effective. Our findings suggest the potential of technology to enable a shift in how prevention interventions are designed and delivered: empowering children and parents through a new model of 'child-led, situated interventions', where participants learn through actionable support directly within family life, as opposed to didactic in-person workshops and a subsequent 'skills application'. This conceptual model was then instantiated in a technology probe, which was deployed with 14 families. The promising field study findings provide an initial proof-of-concept validation of the proposed approach.