Dyadic Mirror: Everyday Second-person Live-view for Empathetic Reflection upon Parent-child Interaction

Abstract

A parent's capacity to understand the mental states of both him/herself and the child is considered to play a significant role in various aspects of parent-child relationship-e.g., lowering parental stress and supporting cognitive development of the child. We propose Dyadic Mirror, a wearable smart mirror which is designed to foster the aforementioned parental capacity in everyday parent-child interaction. Its key feature is to provide a parent with a second-person live-view from the child, i.e., the parent's own face as seen by the child, during their face-to-face interaction. Dyadic Mirror serves as a straightforward cue that helps the parent be aware of (1) his/her emotional state, and (2) the way he/she would be now being seen by the child, thereby facilitate the parent to infer the child's mental state. To evaluate Dyadic Mirror under unconstrained parent-child interactions in real-life, we implemented the working prototype of Dyadic Mirror and deployed it to 6 families over 4 weeks. The participating parents reported extensive experiences with Dyadic Mirror, supporting that Dyadic Mirror has helped them be aware of their recurring but unconscious behaviors, understand their children's feelings, reason with the children's behaviors, and find self-driven momenta to better their attitude and expressions towards their children.