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February 11 - November 7, 2024
For seven years, the primary research and notes for this book languished in the top left-hand drawer of my file cabinet.
We are turning more and more to paid touching professionals.
Most of the recent research about the benefits of touch comes from the new Touch Research Institute and Wellness Center (TRI), in Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s Nova Southeastern University.
Is this still true?
touch with pressure may stimulate the nervous system, thus decreasing levels of the body’s stress hormone, Cortisol, while stimulating the production of feel-good hormones.
Touch with pressure might stimulate feel good hormones.
Within seconds, tears began running down his face. A little later he told me that no one had touched him tenderly like that since his mother had died.
Because of the intense emotions involved, children will turn away from such a scene or try to break it up.
Whatever the underlying cause, emotional problems increase the severity and frequency of skin disorders. It seems that human skin becomes a symbolic outlet for inner emotional problems, for repressed emotions.
Skin becomes a symbolic outlet for emotional problems.
62 percent of psoriasis; 68 percent of hives; from 56 to 70 percent of eczema; 86 percent of itching; 95 percent of warts; 98 percent of severe scratching and subsequent tearing of skin; and 100 percent of profuse sweating was psychologically caused.
Emotional causes for skin issues. Note psoriasis and eczema.
This concept is important to understand because we attach emotions and meanings to touch as a result of the manner in which emotions and meanings were conveyed to us through touch in our childhood.
It is no accident that we refer to both physical touch and emotion with the same word—feeling.
We use the same word for touch and emotion: feeling.
skin hunger.
Thought this was a new term.
Touch is not a pleasant stimulus, but a biological necessity.
Touch is needed to thrive.
Being born actually provides a massage that vitalizes the emerging infant—a way of stimulation that should be continued immediately and for a considerable time after birth.
Contractions massage the baby.
Then, as is still often the custom in our country, the infant is relegated to a room and
I think that this has changed. Now, skin to skin session is done.
Missing both the excruciating pain and the extreme pleasure of a vaginal delivery, “the surgically delivered may never quite overcome their loss.
People born through Ceasarean sections may crave touch because they lacked it in the birthing process.
nursing, and other physical contact not only creates an affectional bond, but aids in physical recovery.
Physical contact promotes faster recovery after birth.
The physical contact that is immediately established, and then continued, stimulates the mother’s body to resume its prebirth condition.
uterine contractions experienced while nursing.
Women have uternine contractions when nursing.
These words were the epitaph for several newborns whom the German emperor Frederick II took away from their parents. He gave them
This is crazy.
In the United States, less than 60 years ago, infant mortality was almost 100 percent for infants under one year of age being raised in orphanages.
Terrible.
“It is during the first year of life that most children are admitted to hospitals for non-organic failure to thrive and 25 percent are admitted during the first month of their lives.
Non organic failure to thrive.
they could be telling you in the only language they know that they need intimate physical contact.
Cute
“Research shows that it is impossible to spoil a baby by satisfying its need for safety and love by holding it.
marasmus, or unexplained infant death,
Suomi,
According to Ashley Montagu, movement is essential for infants, particularly when combined with touching.
Movement essential for babies.
This stimulation affects the heart and helps with circulation. It promotes respiration, discourages lung congestion, and aids in digestion; rocking can be very beneficial after a feeding, especially for a colicky baby, since it assists movement of the intestines.
Benefits of touch for baby.
It takes 15 seconds for babies to stop crying when rocked at this rate; it can even delay the onset of crying.
Good to know.
A baby’s brain grows to 70 percent of its adult weight in the first year of life.
Much of the crying we consider normal baby behavior may be a separation distress call in response to stress.
If most infants in other parts of the world are immediately comforted, and they grow up to function as self-regulated adults—becoming self-reliant earlier, in fact, than do our children—then why aren’t we doing that?
How children in the rest of the world are treated.
Dogmatic and “scientific” child-rearing advice in the past has contributed to physical, mental, and emotional retardation.
Based on substantial research and on what is happening to our society, I now see that couples need to refrain from having children unless one of them can commit to staying home with the baby for, at the least, the first three years.
Let us lobby for infant-care sabbaticals, parenting
higher salaries for workers with children, drastic tax cuts, or other incentives to help families who decide to do parenting the way it needs to be done.
I’ve heard comments about how disgusting it looks to see a baby with a pacifier in its mouth
feel pieces
thermal synchrony
the mother acted almost like a thermostat to keep the infant’s temperature in a certain range.
by simply moving our hands down just a few millimeters so our hands are around the rib cage, we give the baby back its freedom of movement in the arms and neck.
Better way to pick up a baby.
The problem is that our American culture is anti-touch, and, as history remarkably documents, anytime a thing is wanted but suppressed, some other way is sought for satisfaction.
He characterizes three stages of changing intimate needs as a baby becomes a child and then an adolescent: “Hold me tight,” “put me down,” and “leave me alone.” He then connects this sequence of changing intimacies to a repeating pattern.
Morris saw a pattern between how babies conducted their relationships with their mothers and how they later conducted their relationships with their partners.
Boys jostle each other and scuffle in mock fighting.
they often engage Dad in roughhousing.
I believed that much of what went on in the back seats of cars, or motels or wherever, was not so much a need for sex as a need to be held—to be touched, to be affirmed in a most fundamental way, to reach outside their own bodies to find gentleness, tenderness, and understanding
Bill Moyers
so many teenage boys fathering two or three illegitimate children with different girls.
These boys expressed no sense of humiliation or...
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In the end, touch is the last of our senses to turn off the lights.
U.S. friends in a coffee shop tend to touch each other an average of only twice an hour—but French friends touch 110 times, and Puerto Rican friends, 180 times.
Comparison of number of times Americans vs French vs Puerto Ricans touch in an hour.
