The emotional life is developed when a child experiences being loved, which enhances the child's capacity for amor. The emotions of the pleasure appetite should grow before the rational intellect is developed, which is why it is important to express emotional love to children, so that the children can feel that they are loved. Touch is very important, from both father and mother. If children don't feel loved, they're not free, and have stunted emotions. In maturity it is important to have a mature emotional life.
Emotional contact can be pre-natal.
If the mother every day places her hand on her belly, the child will swim to the hand, wherever it is placed, and the child will kick if there's no hand. The child is incapable of volitional love at this stage, but can respond to emotional contact. The capacity to respond emotionally is a sign of a fully human response, not of infantility. When people are afraid of expressing their emotions, they wear a mask. The pleasure emotions provide the emotional responses by which we react to what is pleasurable or not, and the irascible appetite the responses by which the pleasure may be obtained.