"I just let him cry...": Designing Socio-technical Interventions in Families to Prevent Mental Health Disorders

Interventions that help children develop protective factors against mental health disorders are an inherently social endeavour, relying on a number of actors from within the family as well as the school context. Little work thus far in CSCW and HCI has examined the potential of technology to support or enhance such interventions. This paper provides the first steps to unpacking this socio-technical design space, focusing on emotional regulation (ER) as a specific instance of a protective factor. We combine a user-centred approach to understanding lived experiences of families (interviews, design workshops) with an expert-led understanding of what makes interventions psychologically effective. Our findings suggest the potential of technology to enable a shift in how prevention interventions are designed and delivered: empowering children and parents through a new model of `child-led, situated interventions', where participants learn through actionable support directly within family life, as opposed to didactic in-person workshops and a subsequent `skills application'. This conceptual model was then instantiated in a technology probe, which was deployed with 14 families. The promising field study findings provide an initial proof-of-concept validation of the proposed approach.