Primera infancia y desplazamiento forzado: Percepciones sobre crianza, consecuencias emocionales y daños psicológicos

The Colombian armed conflict continues to be an ongoing problem despite the Peace Agreement signed in 2016; one of the manifestations of this conflict that has increased the most is forced displacement, so that Colombian families have transgenerationally experienced the loss of their loved ones, territory, and identity. Children represent one of the populations whose experience of victimization is configured in a direct and indirect way, with long-term repercussions; evidence indicates that these are derived from the violent event per se, from the effects on their living conditions and on the capacity of their caregivers to provide adequate environments for their development, including the transmission of their suffering experienced by the war.

In this order of ideas, the present study aimed to understand the perceptions of the mother or other adult caregivers regarding parenting and the psychological consequences on children who have lived directly or indirectly (through the experiences and impacts on their caregivers) situations of armed conflict and forced displacement. A hermeneutic approach with descriptive scope, guided the epistemological and methodological foundation, for which a semi-structured interview was used with 10 families who at the time of displacement had children in early childhood, located in the District of Kennedy - Bogota. The information collected through the interviews addressed thematic areas related to the process of adaptation to Bogotá as a new city of residence, the reasons for displacement from the place of origin, the effects perceived in the family due to displacement, the effects perceived in the child when the experience of displacement is evoked and the experiences of upbringing in a city different from the place of origin. The interviews were processed by means of content analysis, using the coding and categorization technique, in this way, the abstraction process was carried out taking as initial category psychological damage and emotional consequences and, as emergent category, antecedents and consequences in the family.

An interdependent relationship was found between family conditions and historicity and the perceptions constructed by adults about the effects of displacement on children. In this sense, the place given to children in family history evidences the representation of their subjectivity and upbringing in violent contexts; In this respect, silence is presented as a resource to prevent their children from living or continuing to live the consequences of displacement, in such a way that it is assumed that not involving children in the family history or making them witnesses to it is a way of protecting them; however, this position encloses a perspective of their subjectivity that alienates them, that does not allow them to elaborate the consequences that the history brings for them, even in cases in which the experience was indirect.

The findings presented are relevant in the planning of intervention strategies, in which the recognition and resignification of family history becomes an action that contributes to the repair of individual and collective trauma, as well as the social fabric in societies that are victims of forced displacement.