“It's like educating us older people...”: Unveiling Needs and Expectations Regarding Educational Features within Parental Control Tools

As children are getting access to devices at an increasingly younger age, parents need to grapple with new ways to protect them from online risks. This indicates the need for support from parental control tools to enhance their self-efficacy, which we refer to as educational features. This is little addressed in the existing literature on parental mediation. As we begin to address this gap, we created a low-fidelity prototype with designs of Google's existing parental control as our baseline design. We used the baseline design in semi-structured interviews with 12 parents whose children (aged below 14) are active Internet users, to understand design changes, aligning with their expectations. Our study presents the prototype updated based on the needs and expectations of parents regarding educational features in different contexts and offers guidelines for future research in these directions.