حمایت از ارتباطات پدر و مادر کودک در خانواده های طلاق

Abstract Divorce affects a significant number of children and parents worldwide. We interviewed 10 parents and five children to get a qualitative understanding of the challenges faced by these families and the role of technology in maintaining contact. We found that both parents had a strong need to maintain autonomy in raising the child, though the residential parent had more opportunities to be instrumentally involved. Both parents and children sought to manage tensions between the two households—parents by reducing interruption of the other household, children by trying to keep contact with the other parent as private as possible. Our participants used the telephone as the primary means to stay in touch while apart but expressed dissatisfaction with the limits of audio-only communication. It was difficult to keep a phone conversation engaging—both parents and children instead sought ways to maintain contact through shared activities and routines but found little technological support to do so while separated. Situated in these results, we present implications for design that may aid in creating technologies for communication between parents and young children in divorced families.

. Introduction and motivation Millions of families worldwide are affected by divorce every year (Amato, 2001). In the United States, where this study was conducted, 32% of children live apart from one of their parents because of divorce or separation (Census, 2005). Though the legal definition of divorce, the culture regarding parental separation, and the custody customs vary significantly throughout the world, the consequences of a parent and child living apart seem to be similar despite the heterogeneity of circumstances. Children in divorced families score significantly lower on measures of academic achievement, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-concept, and social relations than children in intact families (Amato, 2001). A meta-analysis of divorce literature from the 1980s and 1990s shows that despite the creation of social programs to support divorced families and the fact that divorce is increasingly common, children's scores have not improved (Amato, 2000). Having both parents participate in the upbringing of the child is related to positive outcomes such as academic success and emotional adjustment (Bauserman, 2002). However, typically, the non-residential parent's involvement tends to be limited. Current visitation practices (i.e. short or infrequent visits supplemented by phone contact) make it difficult for the non-residential parent to contribute equally to raising a child (Wallerstein and Kelly, 1996). Furthermore, a large proportion of distributed parents (25%) are geographically separated from their children by a significant distance, making contact even more difficult (Flango, 2003). A variable that has not been studied is the degree to which the different communication technologies are supportive of the communication between parents and children in divorced families. In this work, we examine the challenges in communication between parents and young children in divorced families in order to inform the design of technologies to support them. We begin by discussing related literature on supporting distributed families and parenting after divorce. We then give an overview of our method and demographics of the participants. We present the major themes that resulted from our interviews in clusters focusing on the unique characteristics of divorced families, the challenges parents and children face in maintaining communication, and current technology use. Finally, we discuss how the results of our interviews can inform the design of technologies for divorced families.

. Conclusion In this work, we argue for the necessity of designing technology for parent–child communication in divorced families. We show that these families exhibit dynamics that are different from intact families and face challenges in communication that are not addressed by current technology. While we cannot predict how new technologies will be adopted by divorced families, we present implication for design that may aid in creating better-situated interventions. Empirical evaluation is the only way that these implications can be assessed, so our future work involves building and deploying systems that incorporate these suggestions. The contributions of this work are threefold. We call attention to supporting divorced families as a potential domain of interest to HCI researchers and designers. We use the results of interviews with parents and children from divorced families to highlight the challenges faced by these families. Lastly, we provide concrete recommendations for designing systems in this domain.