Exploring Technology-Mediated Parental Socialisation of Emotion: Leveraging an Embodied, In-situ Intervention for Child Emotion Regulation

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.