Development of Toys for Determining Behavioral Imitation During Parent-Child Interactions

The number of parents who are troubled by their children’s mental and behavioral problems has been increasing. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), which is a psychotherapy based on play therapy, has been used to help such parents and children by improving the quality of interactions between them through toy play. In PCIT, the number of behavioral imitations during toy play is one of the key indicators to evaluate parenting skills. However, it is difficult to manually evaluate behavioral imitations because it is necessary to simultaneously observe the parent and child manipulating toys to determine whether and to what extent the parent and child imitate each other’s behaviors. We developed two types of toys; toy blocks equipped with sensors and digital drawing application, which enable us to visualize toy manipulations of parents and children and determine behavioral imitations between them. Toy manipulations during parent-child interactions were visualized, and the number and/or the extent of behavioral imitations were determined from the toy-manipulation data, which were obtained using our toys. The results indicate that our toys should have the potential to determine the number and extent of behavioral imitations during parent-child interactions. Thus, these toys should be useful to evaluate parenting skills.