Bodeum: Encouraging working parents to provide emotional support for stay-at-home parents in Korea

Abstract

Although gender equality is commonly found globally, many countries in Asia still show stereotypical gender roles within family relationships between fathers and mothers. In those countries, most stay-at-home mothers are mainly responsible for childcare and housework while fathers work so that some stay-at-home mothers are highly stressed by single childcare. To relieve their parenting stress, emotional support from their spouse is an important factor. However, working parents in single-income families tend to underestimate the childcare difficulties of their spouses. In this work, we propose Bodeum, a proof-of-concept mobile system to facilitate spousal communication by sharing stay-at-home parent's stress level, their childcare activities, and their baby's status with working parents to encourage emotional support for stay-at-home parents. A 2-week feasibility study with nine families in South Korea suggests that Bodeum enhanced spousal communication about parenting stress and showed potential for parenting mothers to lower their perceived parenting stress.