Parental Attachment and its Impacts on Development - A Cultural Perspective

Parental Attachment and its Impacts on Development - A Cultural Perspective

Introduction

The study of parental care has been of interest to researchers for a long time. Part of this interest is motivated by the existence of different theories that seek to investigate the nature of the situations experienced during childhood and the possible effects they may have on the spheres cognitive, emotional, and social development of the child. Furthermore, one must consider that during early development, the child, based on their dependency and immaturity, needs care and the presence of adults to ensure their survival. In this sense, the role of parents becomes crucial.

It is understood that the relationship that parents have with their children depends on the individual variables themselves and their offspring (biological adaptation in evolutionary history of the species) as well as social and environmental variables, understood as cultural pressures that influence and are influenced by biological bases-adaptive parental behavior, modulating their individual expression. However, what has been observed is that, in general, studies on parenting focus their research more specifically on the mother rather than the father.

This paper aims to discuss parental attachment and care, and the role of parents in child development during the early years, using as theoretical perspective evolutionary psychology. For this, first parental care will be covered emphasizing its character interactions, with respect to its cultural attributes (Arbona, 2003). In the second part, the paper will present the characteristics of infants that influence this care and finally, the paper will focus more specifically the characteristics of parental care and its influence on child development.

Discussion

Currently, the convergence of an interactions stance on various theoretical approaches aimed at understanding parental attachment and childcare. The terms describe parenthood much more than mere biological capacity to generate. This means that social responsibilities have different connotations depending on the genre: the parental attachment presented by mother may be biological or not, but she is responsible for the proper development of children, for their education, food, health, whereas the father is seen as responsible for providing the material needs of the family (Arbona, 2003). The role of father and mother encompass meanings to the socio cultural construction of the child development, and therefore strongly influenced by the constitution of identities and gender roles, but which also have biological.

Parental Attachment: Cultural Development

Accordingly, for an understanding of parental behavior from an evolutionary perspective, it is necessary to consider their next and last causal aspects. The explanations consist of near immediate factors that modulate behavioral responses such as physiological stimuli, current environmental conditions, and socio-historical period and psychological states. With respect to ultimate causes, one may think that parental attachment was selected because it has a survival function in the history of evolution of species (Armsden, 1987). That is, evolutionary psychology believes that parental care refers to any behavior that increases the fitness of the offspring, specifically with respect to their survival and reproductive rate, resulting from the care ...