“Ultimately We’re Together”: Understanding New Parents’ Experiences of Co-parenting
Video Social & Behavioral Sciences 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Ya-Fang Lin
Exhibition Number 502
Abstract
Positive co-parenting is critical for parenting and child outcomes, especially for new parents, who suffer from an increase in conflicts and decreased marital relationships. Investigating the practices, strategies, and challenges of new parents' co-parenting, including collaborating, supporting, and relating to each other, can help better understand this vulnerable parenting period. Furthermore, this understanding can bring insights to inform technology design for supporting co-parenting. In this paper, we present an overview of related research on parents' collaboration, support, and relationships. We then report findings from an exploratory semi-structured interview study with 11 pairs of new parents who are interested in co-parenting skills and unpack their helpful co-parenting strategies, tools, and challenges when applying those strategies. We conclude with a discussion of the design implications aiming to support new parents' positive co-parenting in their day-to-day lives and an observation that couples' co-parenting is a case of coproduction.
Importance
The contributions of this study are as follows. First, there is not much Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research trying to understand the challenges when new parents collaborate from the perspective of co-parenting. Therefore, this work fills the gap in HCI literature that lacks an understanding of new parents’ collaborating practices on parenting. Second, with an understanding of new parents’ co-parenting practices, it raises the awareness of design space to support couples’ collaboration, motivates technology design to support co-parenting and thus helps improve co-parenting skills and relationships.