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

2025-11-18

AI Summary

Current affective education research predominantly adopts a child-centered perspective, neglecting parents’ pivotal role in guiding young children’s emotional development. Method: This paper proposes a parent-AI collaboration framework for families with children aged 3–6, integrating parental experiential knowledge with generative AI’s modeling capabilities to support parent-led, AI-augmented emotional dialogues in everyday contexts. Through participatory design, we developed a multimodal AI assistant capable of recognizing vocal, textual, and behavioral cues to help parents accurately identify children’s emotions and generate contextually appropriate response strategies. Results: A field study across 16 families demonstrated significant improvements in the depth of parent–child emotional communication and parental engagement, along with enhanced parental self-efficacy in affective education. This work extends affective coaching theory into familial settings and large language model–human collaborative scenarios, offering a reusable design paradigm and empirical evidence for AI-enhanced family education.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Humans and AI: Emotional Intelligence
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

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. 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 emotional dialogues about common scenarios, with multiple forms of support provided by generative AI. It combines insights from parents and AI to model children's emotional states and collaboratively 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 theory in both family settings and LLM-assisted contexts, offering valuable insights for designing AI-supported, parent-centered family education systems.

Problem

• Existing technologies neglect parents' central role in early childhood emotion education
• Parental challenges in guiding emotional development require AI-supported solutions
• Current systems lack personalized parent-mediated guidance for children's emotional states

Innovation

• Parent-AI collaboration for child emotion education
• Generative AI supports emotional dialogues and scenarios
• Combines parent insights with AI for personalized guidance