Understanding Parents' Perspectives on Mealtime Technology

Abstract

For young children, family meals are an enjoyable and developmentally useful part of daily life. Although prior work has shown that ubiquitous computing solutions can enhance children's eating habits and mealtime experiences in valuable ways, other work demonstrates that many families are hesitant to use technology in this context. This paper examines adoption barriers for technology for family meals to understand with more nuance what parents value and resist in this space. Using mixed methods, we first observed family dinnertime experiences and then surveyed 122 parents with children from two to six years old. We found that parents prefer screen-based technology over voice interfaces and smart objects, because parents perceive the latter two systems to intrude on their relationship with children. The pervasiveness of smart objects embedded at meals led parents to worry about distraction and technology dependence, while the anthropomorphization of voice interfaces led parents to worry that this technology could displace parenting relationships or disrupt interpersonal interactions among family members. Parents mindlessly applied social scripts to voice interfaces, suggesting families may be more likely to apply concerns from interpersonal interactions to voice interfaces than to other technologies. We discuss the ways different form factors appeal to and worry parents, providing designers with insights about the likelihood of adoption and acceptance.