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1. A Home Study of Parent-Child Co-Reading with a Bilingual Conversational Agent

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650836  

   He, Kunlei; Levine, Julian; Cervera, Kelsyann; Ojeda-Ramirez, Santiago; Xu, Ying; Warschauer, Mark (May 2024, ACM)

   Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly prevalent in children’s lives, serving as educational companions, particularly in shared reading activities. While effective for monolingual children’s learning, there exists a gap in meeting the unique needs of the rapidly expanding bilingual child population, who face dual challenges of school readiness and heritage language maintenance. Moreover, most current CAs, designed for one-to-one interactions with children, neglect the importance of parents’ active participation in shared reading. Our study introduces the development and home deployment of a bilingual CA, integrated within e-books, designed to foster parent-child joint engagement in shared reading, thereby promoting children’s bilingual language development. Results of the study indicated high levels of family engagement in co-reading activities over an extended period, with observable language learning gains in children. This study provides valuable design implications for designing effective and engaging CAs for bilingual families. 

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2. Gender Differences, or Lack Thereof, in the Early Home Science Environment

   https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.70034  

   Varnell, Suzanne; Kumar, Sona C; Westerberg, Lauren; Ehrman, Patrick; Herrera, Fabiola; Antony, Chellam; Closser, Avery H; Clark, Elizabeth; Purpura, David J (May 2025, Infant and Child Development)

   ABSTRACT As women are underrepresented in STEM and the home learning environment has been associated with children's science knowledge, this study focuses on the home science environment as an area where gender differences may occur. To identify potential antecedents of gender differences, this study examined whether there were mean differences in the frequency of parent engagement in science content, processes and resources by child gender and parent relation. 906 parents of 1‐ to 6‐year‐old children (67% female, 86% White, 50% female children) completed a cross‐sectional online survey about the home science environment. Results indicate no significant differences in the frequency of science engagement between parents of girls and parents of boys and between mothers and fathers (η² < 0.01). We did not find any significant gender differences in parents' reports of their frequency of engagement in early home science activities across content, processes and resources. 

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3. StoryPal: Supporting Young Children's Dialogic Reading with Large Language Models

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3713043.3728867  

   He, Kunlei; Gastón-Panthaki, Aria; Zhuo, Dongni; Munsey, Joshua; Zhang, Maggie; Warschauer, Mark (June 2025, ACM)

   Early literacy skills are crucial predictors of children’s academic success. Dialogic reading—an interactive approach where adults and children engage in discussions about stories—has proven highly effective in developing these skills. However, many families face barriers implementing this practice due to time constraints, limited resources, or linguistic challenges. We present StoryPal, an LLM-powered conversational agent that facilitates dialogic reading through contextual questioning, adaptive scaffolding, and personalized feedback. In a study with 23 children ages 4-7 from diverse socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds, we found high levels of verbal engagement with distinct patterns between English-dominant and bilingual children. The system’s dynamic scaffolding effectively supported struggling readers while challenging proficient ones. Parents valued StoryPal as a supplementary tool that maintained children’s reading engagement when they were unavailable, but emphasized that it should not replace parent-child interactions. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLM-powered agents to support dialogic reading by adhering to established educational practices. 

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4. How to Support “Little Engineers:” Exploring Preschool Parent–Child Talk during an Engineering Bridge Challenge

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-025-02088-2  

   DeMaster, Dana; Westerberg, Lauren E; Zucker, Tricia A (February 2026, Early Childhood Education Journal)

   Although considerable research demonstrates the value of parent–child discourse about early mathematics during informal learning, less is known about how family talk during engineering activities unfolds. The current study aims to describe and explore the dynamics of engineering and mathematical language that occurs between parents and preschool-aged children (n = 87; M = 59.27 months) while engaging in a bridge-building, engineering challenge. Most of the families in this sample were experiencing poverty and many spoke languages other than English at home. Video recordings of the bridge-building task were coded to examine the frequency of both child and parent engagement in engineering process talk. This analysis included talk about engineering processes related to goal setting, planning, testing, redesigning the bridge, and the use of mathematical language. Regression analyses demonstrated a significant association between parent engineering process talk and children's engineering process talk. Mediation analyses indicated that frequency of child mathematical language partially mediated the relation between parent and child engineering process talk; however, parent mathematical language was not a significant mediator of this relation. An exploratory mediation analysis was conducted, indicating that the relationship between parent mathematical language use and child engineering process talk was fully mediated by child mathematical language use during bridge building, suggesting that children's mathematical talk may facilitate their engagement in engineering discussions. This research, unique in its focus on engineering process talk in early childhood, addresses a gap in the literature on preschool informal engineering experiences. 

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5. Unfulfilled Promises of Child Safety and Privacy: Portrayals and Use of Children in Smart Home Marketing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3637422  

   Sun, Kaiwen; Li, Jingjie; Zou, Yixin; Radesky, Jenny; Brooks, Christopher; Schaub, Florian (April 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Smart home technologies are making their way into families. Parents' and children's shared use of smart home technologies has received growing attention in CSCW and related research communities. Families and children are also frequently featured as target audiences in smart home product marketing. However, there is limited knowledge of how exactly children and family interactions are portrayed in smart home product marketing, and to what extent those portrayals align with the actual consideration of children and families in product features and resources for child safety and privacy. We conducted a content analysis of product websites and online resources of 102 smart home products, as these materials constitute a main marketing channel and information source about products for consumers. We found that despite featuring children in smart home marketing, most analyzed product websites did not mention child safety features and lacked sufficient information on how children's data is collected and used. Specifically, our findings highlight misalignments in three aspects: (1) children are depicted as users of smart home products but there are insufficient child-friendly product features; (2) harmonious child-product co-presence is portrayed but potential child safety issues are neglected; and (3) children are shown as the subject of monitoring and datafication but there is limited information on child data collection and use. We discuss how parent-child relationships and parenting may be negatively impacted by such marketing depictions, and we provide design and policy recommendations for better incorporating child safety and privacy considerations into smart home products. 

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