Understanding the usage of online media for parenting from infancy to preschool at scale

Abstract

New parents, defned as parents of children between the infant and preschooler stages, are increasingly turning to online media to exchange support and information to help with their life-changing transition. Understanding parents' discussion online is crucial to the design and development of technologies that can better support their media interaction. This work studies how new parents use online media using a large-scale parenting corpus. To do so, we frst employed a card-sorting methodology to identify a set of parenting topics, with which we trained BERT classifers to automatically identify the topics of Reddit posts. We then investigate at scale what parenting topics were talked about most by new parents, how topics change over the course of their participation, and how interactions with diferent topics afect members' engagement in the community. We conclude with implications of our research in designing future research and online parenting communities.