"This just felt to me like the right thing to do": Decision-Making Experiences of Parents of Young Children

Parenting comes with many responsibilities, one of which is making ongoing decisions affecting a child's health. While today's parents have access to an abundance of parenting advice and data-both offline and online-little is known about their lived experience with these resources and how it interacts with other aspects of decision-making like intuition. Drawing on a survey of 65 parents and interviews with 12 parents of children aged 0-5 in the United States, we provide the following contributions: an analysis of parents' experiences and needs when using different resources to make health and wellbeing decisions for their child; a definition of parents' lived experiences with intuition throughout the decision-making process; and a discussion of tensions and opportunities for designing in this sensitive space. Our findings can inform new design directions for interactive technology-based parenting support, particularly the potential to consider intuition and make parenting information and data more socially oriented.