Do afeto à maturação emocional: explorando o vínculo parental e o desenvolvimento emocional na primeira infância

Abstract

Parenting is essential during childhood, as it aims to provide the basic conditions for the infant's survival, directly impacting emotional development—a crucial factor for mental health. In this process, the environment can represent both a protective and a risk factor. The overall objective of this study is to analyze the importance of establishing parental bonds for emotional development in early childhood. To this end, the available literature was consulted, following the methodological criteria of an integrative bibliographic review with a qualitative approach. The Pubmed portal was consulted, which includes MEDLINE, the Virtual Health Library of the Ministry of Health (BVS), and the academic search engine (Google Scholar), considering the time frame from 2019 to 2024. The descriptors “Emotional Bonds,” “Parenting,” and “Child Development” were used, combined with the Boolean operator AND. Only complete studies, freely accessible, available in Portuguese, English, and Spanish were included. Other academic formats and studies that did not align with the main objective of this study were excluded. The selection of articles was based on three stages: (1) reading the titles and abstracts, (2) analyzing the methodological approach, (3) reading the material in its entirety. After a thorough analysis of the materials, 16 articles remained to compose the final sample. The results and discussion are organized into four categories of analysis, namely: positive effects of parental care; harm resulting from the absence of parental care; main impacts of sensitive periods of development on emotional maturation; and support for early emotional development. The first three categories correspond to the specific objectives of the research, while the last emerged from the author's analytical perspective. During the process of constructing the work, the need to include possible interventions observed throughout the analysis was identified, thus justifying the creation of this fourth category. With this, in view of the construction of this work, the importance of the parental emotional bond for child development, especially the emotional aspect, was evident.