Children's agency plays a critical role in shaping children's autonomy, participation, and well-being in their interactions with digital systems, particularly in emerging child-AI contexts. However, how designers currently understand and reason about children's agency in practice remains underexplored. In this paper, we examine designers's engagement with children's agency through a participatory workshop in which we introduce a design-for-agency framework that supports designers externalising the consideration of agency in their design contexts. We find that while participants are committed to implementing ethical AI systems for children, they often struggle to understand why agency matters and how it can be operationalised in practice. Our agency design framework provided designers with a structured way to translate implicit, experience-based judgments into explicit articulation of agency trade-offs while acknowledging the associated design complexity. We conclude by offering initial insights into supporting designers' reasoning about children's agency and outlining directions for future research.

翻译：儿童的能动性在塑造其与数字系统互动中的自主性、参与度和福祉方面发挥着关键作用，尤其是在新兴的儿童-人工智能交互情境中。然而，设计者在实践中如何理解和推理儿童的能动性仍鲜有探讨。本文通过一场参与式工作坊，考察了设计者与儿童能动性的互动过程。在该工作坊中，我们引入了一个面向能动性的设计框架，支持设计者在其设计情境中外化对能动性的考量。研究发现，尽管参与者致力于为儿童实施合乎伦理的人工智能系统，但他们常难以理解为何能动性至关重要，以及如何在实践中将其操作化。我们的能动性设计框架为设计者提供了一种结构化路径，使其能够在承认相关设计复杂性的同时，将基于经验的隐性判断转化为对能动性权衡的显性阐述。最后，我们总结了支持设计者推理儿童能动性的初步启示，并提出了未来研究方向。