Parent-Child Joint Media Engagement Within HCI: A Scoping Analysis of the Research Landscape
Abstract
Parents play essential roles in children’s play and learning with various media, often leading to positive and productive engagement outcomes for both parties. As such, an increasing number of HCI research has focused on understanding parent-child joint media engagement (JME) and designing new technologies to foster productive joint media experiences for children and parents. However, we currently lack a systematic view of this emerging field, which hinders the research and design of new joint media experiences and technologies for families. In this work, we conduct a scoping review of parent-child JME research within HCI (N = 89) and analyze the included papers from three lenses: publication features, methodological features, and JME features. Based on these findings, we identify gaps and opportunities in parent-child JME research and further expand the theoretical framing of JME by developing a framework that captures different JME dimensions.
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Many parents expressed an interest in leveraging AI-generated content but also voiced concerns.
“In addition, many parents expressed an interest in leveraging content generated by AI but also voiced concerns, consistent with prior studies on parental control over media content [33, 80] and preferences for creating their own learning materials using AI [28].”
From SET-PAiREd: Designing for Parental Involvement in Learning with an AI-Assisted Educational Robot (2025) · cites this paper as [80]
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“…becomes even more critical for “digital natives” as many media and technologies may negatively impact children’s lives and development, e.g., exposing them to age-inappropriate information like violence [83], resulting in excessive screen time [80], and causing anxiety and depression [2].”
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“…[43, 95] Constructionism [52, 135] Experiential Learning Framework [99, 104] Active Prolonged Engagement (APE) Framework [65] Discourse Scafolding [16] Engineering is Elementary Model [135] Family Alignment of data Models and Stories (FAMS) [7] Information Problem-Solving – Internet (IPS-I) [87]…”
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“%) describe parent-child JME from the perspective of material agency, including how technologies mediate the engagement (e.g., [15, 115]) and how environmental factors like cultures impact the engagement (e.g., [38, 51]).”
Family as a Third Space for AI Literacies: How do children and parents learn about AI together?
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Shen, J. J., King Chen, J., Findlater, L., & Dietz Smith, G. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3713405 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
SET-PAiREd: Designing for Parental Involvement in Learning with an AI-Assisted Educational Robot
Ho, H.-R., Kargeti, N., Liu, Z., & Mutlu, B. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3713330 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
- Authors
- Yu, J., Qi, X., & Yang, S.
- Affiliations
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2024-05-11
- Pages
- 1-21
- OpenAlex
- W4396832189
- Semantic Scholar
- 8a44ca8f7168410f41db992838a3f434e696525c
- Cited by
- 31
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 14
- FWCI
- 104.83
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Child Development and Digital Technology
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- children's media use, family media use, research gaps
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