“This just felt to me like the right thing to do”: Decision-Making Experiences of Parents of Young Children

Video

DOI

Parenting comes with many responsibilities, one of which is making ongoing decisions affecting their child’s health. While today’s parents have access to an abundance of parenting advice and data—both offline and online—little is known about their lived experience with these resources and how it interacts with other aspects of decision-making like intuition. Drawing on a survey of 65 parents and interviews of 12 parents of children aged 0-5 in the U.S., we provide the following contributions: an analysis of parents’ experiences and needs when using different resources to make health and wellbeing decisions for their child; a definition of parents’ lived experiences with intuition throughout the decision-making process; and a discussion of tensions and opportunities for designing in this sensitive space. Our findings can inform new design directions for interactive technology-based parenting support, particularly the potential to consider intuition and make parenting information and data more socially oriented.