PACEE: Supporting Children's Personal Emotion Education through Parent-AI Collaboration

Emotion education is a crucial lesson for children aged 3 to 6. However, existing technologies primarily focus on promoting emotion education from the child's perspective, often neglecting the central role of parents in guiding early childhood emotion development at home. In this work, we conducted co-design sessions with five experienced kindergarten teachers and five parents to identify parental challenges and the roles that AI can play in family emotion education. Guided by these insights, we developed PACEE, an assistant for supporting parent-AI collaborative emotion education. PACEE enables parents to engage in conversations about common emotional scenarios, with multiple forms of AI support to address parents' challenges. It combines insights from parents and AI to model children's emotional states and delivers personalized, parent-mediated guidance. In a user study involving 16 families, we found that PACEE significantly enhances parent-child engagement, encourages more in-depth emotional communication, and improves the parental experience. Our findings advance emotion coaching guidelines for family education in the era of generative AI, offering valuable insights for designing AI-supported, parent-centered family education systems.