Attitudes Towards Touch
We all know too well that we live in a fast paced, goal directed, multitask oriented world but our need for touch remains – that’s one of the reasons why people keep pets, so that they can touch them and be touched.
The potency of touch holds immense potential for use and misuse, the potential for harm as well as healing. The tender, loving touch of a parent has long been recognized as a primal need. The simple kiss a parent plants on a toddler’s scraped knee is universally accepted as the best medicine.
But today, with our media full of terrible stories of child abuse some adults are becoming increasingly uncomfortable about touching youngsters. Dr Tiffany Field founder of Touch Institute of the University of Miami’s School of Medicine, Florida, says "We've become such a litigious society," "Children are touch deprived”.
As I wrote those words last year a Channel 9 News (NSW, Australia) report caught my attention. The story’s heading was “Touch too much: pupils protest at school ban on contact”. The report said: “Pupils at a Mornington Peninsula primary school have staged a protest on their school oval after they were banned from hugging or giving each other high-fives in a move blasted as ‘outrageous’ and ‘unbelievable’ by parents.” The ban includes contact sports and playing “tiggy”.
Outcomes from the Lack of Touch
Children raised with a lack of touch have abnormally high levels of stress hormones and a lack of touch can have a profound impact on the will to live. Abused, neglected or touch deprived children learn not to trust touch. They tend to have great difficulty feeling of value, feeling truly powerful, or of forming reciprocally supportive relationships as adults. They are injured by the lack of touch or by abusive touch.
Touch deprived children can demonstrate developmental delays, lack concentration and develop symptoms indistinguishable from autism. The effects of touch deficiencies can have lifelong serious negative ramifications. Frances M Carlson, author of “Essential Touch: Meeting the Needs of Young Children” says “What I think we don’t understand in this culture is that withholding touch from children from fear is as physically and emotionally harmful to children as harmful touch is”.
Numerous studies have shown that children who are appropriately held, hugged, cuddled and touched enjoy better health and growth, mentally and physically and turn out to be more intelligent than those children who are “touch starved”.
Infants and children who receive regular massage experience many benefits and an overall sense of well being and in their “earliest stages of development have higher scores on physical, emotional, and interpersonal skills”.
Teaching parents infant massage and encouraging them to see it as a lifelong gift for their children and hopefully their children’s children is, I believe, one of the cornerstones in the building blocks of parenting and child development.
Additionally, the ‘icing on the cake’ is that as many of these massaged children grow older they begin to return this gift to their parents offering them a massage too. One child has been quoted as saying “When my Dad is angry I massage him and he is not angry anymore”!!
But we need to be cognizant of the pressures of touch phobia and not allow this to cause significant health issues to our future generations. Infant massage may not be the cure-all for that. But it's a very good start.
Encouraging parents to massage their babies and to continue this practice for as long as possible, and hopefully into adolescents is good for humanity.
When we start touching one another it brings in trust, intimacy, vulnerability and kindness perhaps then there will be less violence, less disregard for human life and more understanding.
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