Understanding Parents' Desires in Moderating Children's Interactions with GenAI Chatbots through LLM-Generated Probes

TL;DR

Three key insights are revealed: (1) parents express concern about interactions that current GenAI chatbot parental controls neglect; (2) parents want fine-grained transparency and moderation at the conversation level; and (3) parents need personalized controls that adapt to their desired strategies and children's ages.

Abstract

This paper studies how parents want to moderate children's interactions with Generative AI chatbots, with the goal of informing the design of future GenAI parental control tools. We first used an LLM to generate synthetic child-GenAI chatbot interaction scenarios and worked with four parents to validate their realism. From this dataset, we carefully selected 12 diverse examples that evoked varying levels of concern and were rated the most realistic. Each example included a prompt and a GenAI chatbot response. We presented these to parents (N=24) and asked whether they found them concerning, why, and how they would prefer the responses to be modified and communicated. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) parents express concern about interactions that current GenAI chatbot parental controls neglect; (2) parents want fine-grained transparency and moderation at the conversation level; and (3) parents need personalized controls that adapt to their desired strategies and children's ages.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Our study procedure. We design, generate, select, and present realistic scenarios to parents as probes in semi-structured interviews, then analyze parents' responses.
• Figure 2: Our scenario selection process. The variance in parents' concern ratings is plotted against their realism ratings for each scenario; Scenarios selected via our thresholding are marked with black squares.
• Figure 3: Terminology of Theme Frequency Descriptions
• Figure 4: The binary block map shows concern factors mentioned by each parent, grouped by the child’s age. A filled square indicates the parent identified that factor at least once; a blank means it was not raised or encountered in their interview. Vertical dashed lines mark age group boundaries. The most frequently mentioned concern factor was Child Could Have Questionable Intentions, and this was raised by most parents across all age groups.
• Figure 5: This heatmap of concern types per scenario shows the initial codes identified in parents' concern factors for each scenario. Darker cells indicate more parents raised those themes; white cells mean none. The factors parents identified as sources of their concerns varied across scenarios. Some concerns stood out within individual scenarios, for example, Model Doesn't Clarify Child's Intent in Scenario 4.