The Hidden Load: Parenting Young Children while Leading in Critical Professions
2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026, Barcelona, İspanya, 13 - 17 Nisan 2026, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
- Doi Numarası: 10.1145/3772318.3790570
- Basıldığı Şehir: Barcelona
- Basıldığı Ülke: İspanya
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Attentional control, Boundary management technologies, Boundary permeability, Frontline leadership, Heart rate variability (HRV), In-the-wild stress monitoring, Normalized heart rate (NHR), Occupational stress, Parenting and caregiving, Wearable sensing
- Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Parenting while serving as a frontline leader is uniquely stressful, yet little is known about how family responsibilities shape physiological stress in these roles. We followed emergency physicians and tactical police leaders, comparing parents of young children with non-parents across four days: one critical mission day, two standard workdays, and one non-workday. Using wearable sensing, expert activity labeling, and daily debriefs, we inferred stress only in sedentary epochs via a normalized-heart-rate method, with an HRV-based index as benchmark. Parents showed higher stress on workdays and non-workdays, but not on critical mission days, where attentional narrowing and strict device policies appear to suppress parenting-related differences. We contribute: (i) in-the-wild physiological evidence that parenthood amplifies stress mainly under permeable boundaries, (ii) a pragmatic stress-labeling pipeline for safety-critical settings, (iii) a configuration-based account linking boundaries, attention, and parenting, and (iv) design implications for stress-aware boundary management systems, supported by an open analysis repository.