I confess
I love that
which caresses
me.
Touch is good for children and other living things, and
deprivation of touch is not. Baby mice who snuggle with their
mothers grow fatter; lambs who are not licked fail to stand up
and may soon die. And what Psych 101 student can forget biologist
Harry Harlow's doleful infant rhesus monkey, clutching a clown-faced,
towel-chested, lightbulb-hearted surrogate mother, and when forced
to choose, preferring to cuddle rather than eat?
Human infants who are not held "fail to thrive," and if they survive, they may become social misfits. In 1915, visiting children's hospitals and orphanages, the pediatrician Henry Chapin discovered that the infants under age two, though fed and bathed adequately, were perishing from marasmus, or "wasting away." It took several decades to identify the other minimum daily requirement: touch. Because this was a presumed distaff function, women were dispatched to the institutions to perform the task of "mothering" (holding the infants) and death rates plummeted. Since then, lack of touch in childhood has been implicated in pathologies from ecsema to anorexia.
Loving touch seems to promote not only individual health but social harmony as well. Tiffany Field, the director of the Touch Research Institute at Miami University's medical school, compared children on the playgrounds in Florida with those in Paris and found that adult touch from parents, teachers, and babysitters was correlated with peaceful and cooperative play among the children. The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott made even grander claims. Analyzing information on four hundred preindustrial societies, he concluded that a peaceful society starts with touch. "Those societies which give their infants the greatest amount of physical affection were characterized by low theft, low infant physical pain . . . and negligible or absent killing, mutilation, or torturing of the enemy," whereas those with the lowest amounts of physical affection were characterized by high incidences of the above. Prescott claimed, rather sweepingly, that his findings "directly confirm that the deprivation of body pleasure during infancy is significantly linked to a high rate of crime and violence." This link is biological, he implied: low touch programs the body to a short fuse and a quick punch.
Anthropologists concur that America is an exceedingly "low-touch," high-violence culture. But America's diversity, mobility, and high immigration probably belie any biological relationship between the first characteristic and the second. A more likely interpretation of these facts and Prescott's other findings is social. A culture that lavishes gentle attention on its young also may encourage tolerance of the vulnerable and discourage physical power-mongering. People brought up to be aggressive and suspicious of intrusions against their own body's "boundaries," on the other hand, will be more self-protective and territorial and thus more belligerent, both socially and sexually.
Sociobiology, in particular the kind that compares humans with other beasts, is of even more limited utility when explaining children's sexual development. Harlow's monkeys might have been like us when it came to clinging to Mama, but they also masturbated in public and would have as soon copulated with a partner half their age as with a peer. Behave that way in America and you could get sent to your room without supper, or to jail.
In other words, human touch acquires meaning in a culture, and primary among those meanings is whether or not a given touch, response, or even body part is sexual. Before a Western child has been "civilized," the penis, clitoris, vagina, or anus may be sources of pleasant feelings, like the knees or back, or interesting orifices into which to poke things, like the mouth or ears--not secret or thrilling "sexual" parts. Even claimed evidence of the biological "naturalness" of child sexuality is surreptitiously meaning-laden. Psychologists and sex educators are fond of pulling out ultrasound photos of erect fetal penises to demonstrate that children are sexual before birth. But what they call a prenatal "erection," thus lending it sexual connotation, may be nothing more than a nervous response to the warm amniotic waves inside the uterus. Alfred Kinsey named a certain combination of infantile bucking, straining, and relaxation "orgasm," but he could just as easily have observed a baby's face scrunching in consternation and its body tensing in exertion, then resolving into beatific calm while he discerned a distinct odor emanating from the diaper.
Recent fierce contests over sexuality can be read as disputes
over the meanings of touch--more precisely, over whether certain
touches between certain people are sexual and, if they are sexual,
whether they are "inappropriate" and therefore "harmful."
Will intergenerational bathing or nude swimming, or sleeping in
a "family bed" when a child is small, harmfully stimulate
a child sexually? The scant available data on these practices
generally say no: in fact, such relaxed family touch and sight
are usually found to be benign or even propitious to later sexual
adjustment. Yet, in these conservative times, many popular advice
columnists counsel parents against them, just in case.
Introduction from Harmful to Minors