Parental involvement and child's temperament: a systematic review of the literature

Abstract

The objective of this study was to analyze the scientific production on relations between parental involvement and child’s temperament. A systematic review of the literature was conducted through the search of articles published in indexed scientific journals between 2007 and 2016, in PsycINFO, PePSIC, and SciELO databases. Thirteen quantitative studies met the designated criteria. Most of them investigated nuclear families, in which both parents lived with a child of up to three years of age. The results were diverse due to the variety of objectives, samples investigated, instruments applied, as well as the types of statistical analysis performed. Most studies revealed correlations between involvement and temperament, although the dimensions that correlated in some situations, were different for mother and father. We observed the fathers’ tendency to become more involved with children with difficult temperament, possibly in the sense of helping the mother to deal with the challenges of raising children in these cases. Nevertheless, there was a predominance of studies that indicated the easier the child’s temperament the greater parental involvement. These results encourage future research on parental involvement and children’s temperament, especially with families with different configurations and in the Brazilian context, where studies on the subject were not found.