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When a child is admitted to the hospital with a critical illness, their family must adapt and manage care and stress. CSCW researchers have shown the potential for collaborative technologies to support and augment care collaboration between patients and caregivers. However, as a field CSCW lacks a holistic, theory-driven understanding of how collaborative technologies might best augment and support the family caregiving circle as a socio-technical system. In this paper, we report findings from interviews with 14 parents of children with cancer admitted for extended hospitalizations. We use the resilience-based Family Adaptive Systems framework from family therapy as a lens to characterize their challenges and practices across four key subsystems: Emotion, Control, Meaning, and Maintenance. Then, we introduce a fifth system-the Information system-and draw on our empirical findings to suggest theory-driven opportunities for designing future collaborative technology to augment collaborative caregiving and enhance family resilience. 

When their child is hospitalized, parents take on new caregiving roles, in addition to their existing home and work-related responsibilities. Previous CSCW research has shown how technologies can support caregiving, but more research is needed to systematically understand how technology could support parents and other family caregivers as they adopt new coordination roles in their collaborations with each other. This paper reports findings from an interview study with parents of children hospitalized for cancer treatment. We used the Role Theory framework from the social sciences to show how parents adopt and enact caregiving roles during hospitalization and the challenges they experience as they adapt to this stressful situation. We show how parents experience 'role strain' as they attempt to divide caregiving work and introduce the concept of 'inter-caregiver information disparity.' We propose design opportunities for caregiving coordination technologies to better support caregiving roles in multi-caregiver teams.