The Homework Wars: Exploring Emotions, Behaviours, and Conflicts in Parent-Child Homework Interactions

TL;DR

This study uses naturalistic data and large language models to analyze real-time parent-child homework interactions, revealing emotional shifts, conflict patterns, and parental behaviors to inform family education strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel LLM-based framework for analyzing fine-grained, real-world parent-child homework interactions at scale, addressing previous research gaps.

Findings

Identified 18 recurring parental behaviors and 7 conflict types.

Found significant emotional shifts in parents before and after homework sessions.

Discovered correlations between well-intentioned behaviors and specific conflicts.

Abstract

Parental involvement in homework is a crucial aspect of family education, but it often triggers emotional strain and conflicts. Despite growing concern over its impact on family well-being, prior research has lacked access to fine-grained, real-time dynamics of these interactions. To bridge this gap, we present a framework that leverages naturalistic parent-child interaction data and large language models (LLMs) to analyse homework conversations at scale. In a four-week in situ study with 78 Chinese families, we collected 475 hours of audio recordings and accompanying daily surveys, capturing 602 homework sessions in everyday home settings. Our LLM-based pipeline reliably extracted and categorised parental behaviours and conflict patterns from transcribed conversations, achieving high agreement with expert annotations. The analysis revealed significant emotional shifts in parents before and after homework, 18 recurring parental behaviours and seven common conflict types, with Knowledge Conflict being the most frequent. Notably, even well-intentioned behaviours were significantly positively correlated with specific conflicts. This work advances ubiquitous computing methods for studying complex family dynamics and offers empirical insights to enrich family education theory and inform more effective parenting strategies and interventions in the future.