  Children typically learn to identify and express emotions through sharing
their stories and feelings with others, particularly their family. However, it
is challenging for parents or siblings to have emotional communication with
children since children are still developing their communication skills. We
present ChaCha, a chatbot that encourages and guides children to share personal
events and associated emotions. ChaCha combines a state machine and large
language models (LLMs) to keep the dialogue on track while carrying on
free-form conversations. Through an exploratory study with 20 children (aged
8-12), we examine how ChaCha prompts children to share personal events and
guides them to describe associated emotions. Participants perceived ChaCha as a
close friend and shared their stories on various topics, such as family trips
and personal achievements. Based on the findings, we discuss opportunities for
leveraging LLMs to design child-friendly chatbots to support children in
sharing emotions.
