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1. The Lived Experience of Child-Owned Wearables: Comparing Children's and Parents’ Perspectives on Activity Tracking

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445376  

   Oygür, Iþil; Su, Zhaoyuan; A. Epstein, Daniel; Chen, Yunan (May 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Children are increasingly using wearables with physical activity tracking features. Although research has designed and evaluated novel features for supporting parent-child collaboration with these wearables, less is known about how families naturally adopt and use these technologies in their everyday life. We conducted interviews with 17 families who have naturally adopted child-owned wearables to understand how they use wearables individually and collaboratively. Parents are primarily motivated to use child-owned wearables for children's long-term health and wellbeing, whereas children mostly seek out entertainment and feeling accomplished through reaching goals. Children are often unable to interpret or contextualize the measures that wearables record, while parents do not regularly track these measures and focus on deviations from their children's routines. We discuss opportunities for making naturally-occurring family moments educational to positively contribute to children's conceptual understanding of health, such as developing age-appropriate trackable metrics for shared goal-setting and data reflection. 

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2. Investigating family perceptions and design preferences for an in-home robot

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3392063.3394411  

   Bengisu Cagiltay, Hui-Ru Ho (June 2020, IDC '20: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference)

   Child-robot interactions in educational, developmental, and health domains are widely explored, but little is known about how families perceive the presence of a social robot in their home environment and its participation in day-to-day activities. To close this gap, we conducted a participatory design (PD) study with six families, with children aged 10--12, to examine how families perceive in-home social robots participating in shared activities. Our analysis identified three main themes: (1) the robot can have a range of roles in the home as a companion or as an assistant; (2) family members have different preferences for how they would like to interact with the robot in group or personal interactions; and (3) families have privacy, confidentiality, and ethical concerns regarding a social robot's presence in the home. Based on these themes and existing literature, we provide guidelines for the future interaction design of in-home social robots for children. 

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3. Tandem: At-Home Behavior Assessment Using Multimodal Signals from the Parent-Child Dyad

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3770705  

   Kalanadhabhatta, Manasa; Rahman, Tauhidur; Grabell, Adam S; Ganesan, Deepak (December 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies)

   The quality of parent-child interactions at an early age has been linked to children's social-emotional development, executive function, and risk for behavior problems. As such, parent-child interactions in naturalistic settings could present a unique opportunity to screen for at-risk behavior in young children, enabling timely and targeted interventions. In this work, we validate the feasibility of using structured at-home play sessions, completed via the Tandem smartphone app, to enable highly accurate and scalable behavioral assessments. We demonstrate that audio and physiological signals recorded during the play session can be used to capture key markers of parent-child interaction dynamics, which are more indicative of at-risk behavior compared to features from each individual alone. We propose novel audio-based dyadic interaction features that significantly outperform conventional speech features at predicting risk for behavior problems, achieving an F1 score of 0.87. Furthermore, we show that dyadic physiological synchrony features, extracted from privacy-preserving wearable sensor data, can classify at-risk behavior with an F1 score of 0.91. Tandem thus sets the stage for automated at-home behavior assessment tools for young children that balance screening accuracy with practical deployment considerations. 

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4. Co-designing for Education

   Bettencourt, Benjamin; Pera, Maria_Soledad; Kennington, Casey; Landau_Wright, Katherine; Fails, Jerry_Alan (June 2024, IDC 2024 Technology-Enhanced STEM Learning in Childhood Workshop)

   Designing for child-learning involves a number of stakeholders including, but not limited to: teachers, children, administrators, and families. A common approach used to design technologies is co-design. Yet, co-design frequently means different things for different stakeholders. Within the realm of education co-design can be used generally for any interaction with a stakeholder that can be used to guide or inform the design of the desired outcome (product or curriculum) -- often with different stakeholders separately and/or in very small groups (e.g. a group of teachers or 2-3 children, or a classroom if ``testing''). Within the field of child-computer interaction, designing technologies with and for children can involve children and other stakeholders in varying levels of involvement, although within the IDC community it is often a more substantial contribution. We posit that giving child stakeholders an authentic voice in the design of technologies is crucial to fully addressing stakeholder's needs. 

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5. 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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