Being touched – the transformative potential of nurturing touch practices in relation to toddlers’ learning and emotional well-being

ABSTRACT

The article investigates how nurturing touch practices, such as gentle brush massage, finger massage and body massage, are applied in 10 Danish toddlers’ early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Thirteen practitioners contributed to the study with written narratives on their experiences with nurturing touch practices and how they influenced their relationship with the children and the conditions for toddlers’ emotional well-being and learning at the nursery or family day care. This qualitative case study is built on a relational ontology and draws on Hundeide’s ([2007]. When empathic care is obstructed – excluding the child from the zone of intimacy. In S. Bråten (Ed.), On being moved from mirror neurons to empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) concept of a zone of intimacy. The practitioners describe how nurturing touch practices can enhance their sensitivity and the intersubjective space between them and the children. The practitioners also describe how toddlers seem to become more attentive to their bodies, more relaxed and flexible. The study invites policy-makers and practitioners to broaden their focus on children’s learning and to consider how the mutual relatedness between practitioner and child influence children’s bodily, non-verbal and emotional experiences and participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Toddler ECEC settings
• learning
• emotional well-being
• nurturing touch
• participation
• massage
• relational ontology

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the practitioners from ‘With the Child in the Centre’ for their engagement, attentiveness and lively reflections in the narratives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lone Svinth is an Associate professor, PhD in Educational Psychology.

ORCID

Lone Svinth http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7399-980X.

Notes

1. Harrison (2001) suggests two basic types of touch: (1) procedural touch and (2) nurturing touch. Procedural touch is the basic physical contact as part of daily routines in an ECEC: feeding, nappy changing, transferring etc. Nurturing touch, on the other hand, is more comforting and includes caressing, brush massage and other forms of tactile or kinaesthetic stimulation (Harrison, 2001). Nurturing touch will be used as a synonym for tactile encounters. In this paper, massage will also be considered a tactile encounter. According to Cambridge dictionary, a ‘massage’ is to rub and press someone’s body with regular repeated movements, in order to, e.g. relax them. Massages offer the same tactile stimulation as nurturing touch. Either touch encounters or massage practices are explicit mentioned in the Early Childhood Education and Care Policy in Denmark. In the Danish curriculum, ‘Body and motion’ is never the less one of the six themes for ECECs to work with. Among the experiences, children should have in this category are; increased awareness of the body, the use of all senses, joy and well-being related to an active body.

2. The term ECEC practitioner covers pedagogues at nurseries for toddlers and family child care providers.

3. According to Nordic Statistical http://91.208.143.100/pxweb/norden/pxweb/en/Nordic%20Statistics/Nordic%20Statistics__Nordic%20Gender%20Equality%20Indicators__Family%20and%20care/chil03.px/table/tableViewLayout1/?rxid=01643a91-8d5f-486e-89f3-3ea2eba91196.

4. Emotional well-being is related to capacities of attachment, positive affect, self-regulation and persistence (Laevers, 2005).

5. This double-sided character of touch could also have been inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s work on phenomenological understanding and his theory of body and intercorporeality. Investigating the relation between the pedagogue’s own body and that of the child is highly relevant but outside the scope of this study.

6. Hundeide suggests as a way into the zone that the adult first establish contact by imitating the child’s gestures and initiatives, and then gradually developing this imitation into communication and participation in the child’s activities. According to Hundeide, this is a way of responding by following the child’s initiative. As long as a child produces expressive or goal-oriented initiatives and actions, it is always possible to start a simple communication by initiating a cycle of turn-taking (Hundeide, 2007, p. 250).

7. The settings were part of a two-year-long participatory research and development program called ‘With the Child in the Centre’ (Broström, Hansen, Jensen, & Svinth, 2016). The Project was financed by the 16 participating municipalities who also did the selection of both settings and participants to the project ‘With the Child in the Centre’. The 13 participants in the case study reported in this article, were among the 90 participants in the author’s research workshop on ‘practitioner-toddler interaction and learning in 0-2 ECEC settings’ (Svinth, 2017). The 13 practitioners were the only one in the group with a regular tough practice extended beyond everyday physical contact like holding a child, caressing a child and procedural touch. I meet the participants on 16 occasions at workshop meetings at two different campuses in two Danish cities. I was an external researcher and did visit the participating settings.

8. By selecting these two themes, there are other relevant themes that are not addressed in the analysis. One potential theme that is indirectly excluded by this analytical focus is the practitioners’ reports on children who turn down an invitation to a nurturing touch encounter. All practitioners had nurturing touch as a voluntary activity, and two of them explicitly stated that not all children are interested in, e.g. finger or brush massage.

9. NAEYC (1996).

Additional information

Funding

This research was financed by 16 municipalities together with Aarhus University.