Parental Collaboration and Closeness: Envisioning with New Couple Parents

TL;DR

This paper explores how technology can support emotional closeness and interdependence among new co-parent couples by envisioning innovative features that foster fun, validation, and shared competence.

Contribution

It introduces a new design space for co-parenting technology emphasizing emotional closeness and interdependence, based on insights from parent scenarios and design probes.

Findings

Parents use technology for co-parenting tasks and information sharing.

Envisioned technologies support emotional awareness and fun interactions.

Design space expands to include interdependence and positive emotions.

Abstract

Couples often experience a decrease in closeness as they cope with the demands of parenthood. Existing technologies have supported parenting and parental collaboration. However, these technologies do not adequately support closeness in co-parenting. We use scenarios and design probes to brainstorm with 10 new parent couples to explore and envision possibilities for technologies to support closeness. We reported parents' current technology use for co-parenting and how participants considered and envisioned co-parenting technology for closeness, including information and task sharing, emotion awareness and disclosure, and fostering fun interaction. We discuss the potential technology has for fostering closeness in co-parenting by (1) fostering interdependence by supporting parental competence and (2) integrating positive emotions and experiences, such as validation and fun, in parenting. Based on our findings, we expand the design space of technology for closeness to include interdependence. We also expand the design space for co-parenting technology by integrating more positive emotions.