Designing Daily Supports for Parent-Child Conversations about Emotion: Ecological Momentary Assessment as Intervention

Parental emotion coaching approaches that advocate for noticing and validating child emotions can greatly impact children's regulatory abilities. However, in daily life, parents often struggle to apply emotion coaching strategies that they access through parenting programmes or online help, suggesting a need for in situ support. This paper explores a potential new avenue for providing such support. We undertook conceptual work to develop a set of emotion-focused reflective questions that could increase parents’ attention to child emotions and delivered these as daily ecological momentary assessments (EMAs). We investigated the perceived impact of the approach through a 2-week online trial (n=33) and then co-designed child-facing component with parents through a 4-week asynchronous remote community study (n=15). Our paper contributes (1) conceptual insights on designing a potential novel intervention approach, (2) empirical insights on its acceptability and perceived impacts for parents, and (3) design implications for applying the approach to wider psychological constructs.