To mitigate the negative impacts of online videos on teenagers, existing research and platforms have implemented various parental mediation mechanisms, such as Parent-Child Joint Media Engagement (JME). However, JME generally relies heavily on parents' time, knowledge, and experience. To fill this gap, we aim to design an automatic tool to help parents/children censor videos more effectively and efficiently in JME. For this goal, we first conducted a formative study to identify the needs and expectations of teenagers and parents for such a system. Based on the findings, we designed YouthCare, a personalized collaborative video censorship tool that supports parents and children to collaboratively filter out inappropriate content and select appropriate content in JME. An evaluation with 10 parent-child pairs demonstrated YouthCare's several strengths in supporting video censorship, while also highlighting some potential problems. These findings inspire us to propose several insights for the future design of par
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713360
Left-Behind Children (LBC) refers to children who lack daily companionship due to their parents working away from home, accounting for approximately one-fifth of all children in China. Due to the lack of communication and emotional support from their parents, LBCs often experience physical and mental health issues. Effective communication is usually limited by time and topics, and the format of mobile devices and video calls is not always suitable. To address this issue, we developed the Accompany Sleep system. Parents upload daily life content through the app, and the system uses ChatGPT4o to create bedtime stories projected to the LBC. To explore the role of Accompany Sleep in family mediation, we conducted a one-month user study involving four families. The results of the study indicated that both parents and children exhibited positive behaviors, the parent-child relationship was effectively strengthened, and GenAI played a crucial role in this process. Based on these findings, this paper discusses how Accompany Sleep facilitated behavioral changes and improved parent-child relationships while expanding the application of GenAI in the family domain.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713192
Children's increasing use of social video platforms like YouTube and TikTok raises safety concerns for parents, yet little research explores how they mediate their children's social video consumption. Previous studies often treat online harms and benefits as outcomes of parental mediation, overlooking how these factors affect parental mediation or how these effects vary with parents’ self-efficacy. To address these gaps, we surveyed 285 parents and found that perceived content informativeness value and content-inherent harm increase mediation, while entertainment value and creator trustworthiness decrease it. Parents’ self-efficacy—digital literacy and confidence in understanding their children's consumption—and children's consumption frequency significantly moderate these effects. These findings lead us to discuss how parental mediation differs between traditional media and social video platforms, where parents perform a more complex benefit-harm analysis due to competing effects of perceived harms and benefits. We propose strategies for enhancing parents’ self-efficacy and platform-parent collaboration in children's online safety.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713422
AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to support their children's learning. We designed a card-based kit, SET, to systematically capture scenarios that have different extents of parental involvement. We developed a prototype interface, PAiREd, with a learning companion robot to deliver LLM-generated educational content that can be reviewed and revised by parents. Parents can flexibly adjust their involvement in the activity by determining what they want the robot to help with. We conducted an in-home field study involving 20 families with children aged 3--5. Our work contributes to an empirical understanding of the level of support parents with different expectations may need from AI and robots and a prototype that demonstrates an innovative interaction paradigm for flexibly including parents in supporting their children.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713330
Collaborative health-tracking technologies for children and parents have gained significant attention in recent years in HCI. This review examines the current state of these technologies by analyzing 29 studies screened from 15,973 search results across three databases. Our findings revealed three primary goals in these technologies: promoting family health, improving children’s health through child-parent co-tracking, and fostering children’s independence in self-tracking. For each goal, we examined child-parent roles, data types collected, and features that facilitate or hinder collaboration. Our findings highlight key directions for future research, including designing adaptable technologies to reflect evolving child-parent roles, exploring different technologies and tracking topics that impact child-parent dynamics, involving children in the system design stage to enhance collaborative features, and studying diverse populations with varied family characteristics. These insights aim to guide the creation of more effective and inclusive collaborative health-tracking technologies for children and parents.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713596
Children are playing games from a young age and, despite their best efforts, parents often lack the support to fully understand what their children are playing. Ratings systems like PEGI are designed to allow informed parental decisions, but it is currently largely unknown if they capture what parents care about. In this study, we analysed 821 1-star reviews of 40 top-grossing mobile games on the Google Play store focused on parental concerns. We used content analysis to identify the key concerns that parents were expressing with regards to the games their children were playing. The reviews found that parents often reported technical issues, issues surrounding in-game purchases and concerns around player-to-player interaction. This research has implications for the way games are sold to parents and the way children play games, as well as presenting some suggestions for future research and innovation in this area.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713614