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ABSTRACT
The present study examines young children’s distress management in situ, focusing on situations of crying and caregivers’ embodied—haptic—soothing responses in preschools in Sweden. The adults’ responses to crying involve embraces, stroking, and patting. Haptic soothing is managed by calibrating the bodily proximity and postural orientations between the participants, including haptic—embracing or face-to-face—formations that are coordinated with particular forms of talk. Haptic formations configure specific affordances for embodied participation by actualizing the availability of tactile, aural, and visual modalities. The interactional organization of soothing in an embracing formation involves: an initiation/invitation and response, submergence of two bodies into a close haptic contact, and coordinated withdrawal from haptic contact. The embracing formation temporarily suspends the requirements for the distressed person to act like a responsive listener and speaker. The caregiver uses the face-to-face formation to reestablish conditions for the child’s interactional co-presence. Data are in Swedish and English translation.
Funding
Financial support from Swedish Research Council (VR) is gratefully acknowledged.
Transcript conventions
Talk has been transcribed using the conventions developed by G. Jefferson. Original talk in Swedish is provided in regular type and indicative translation in italics.
| [ | = | indicates overlapping talk. |
| [(( | = | indicates the initial point of the participants’ movements or actions. |
| @ | = | indicates the onset of embracing formation. |
| @@ | = | indicates the endpoint of embracing formation. |
| § | = | indicates the onset of face-to-face formation. |
| §§ | = | indicates the endpoint of face-to-face formation. |
| # | = | indicates the point where screen shot has been taken. |
| FRANK | = | the caregiver is identified in capital letters. |
| Gustav | = | the child is identified in regular letters. |
| = | : indicates 0.2-second length of a crying token |
Notes
1 Preschool staff and all children’s parents were informed about the study aims and ethical procedures, and their informed consent was obtained. The data collection has followed the Swedish Research Council’s ethical guidelines for collecting and handling data. Names, images, and other identifiers have been anonymized.
2 The present data do not show gender- or age-related differences regarding the types and character of caregivers’ responses to crying.
3 Due to the intensive sound level in preschool groups (10–15 children playing in adjacent rooms), acoustic analysis was carried out when the technical conditions of the recording situation were satisfactory.
4 In the transcripts, the initial point of engagement and withdrawal from a particular haptic formation are indicated by using single and double @; § symbols. The particular haptic formation is sustained between these points.
5 While Kendon’s notion of spatial-orientational units of participant is centered around participants’ access to each other’s transactional segment (including gaze as a condition for organizing and coordinating social interaction), the haptic head-to-head formation suspends such requirements, and coordination is enabled through haptic contact rather than the participants’ publicly visible actions.
6 Passive touch (touch contact without movement, e.g., in embrace) involves cutaneous sensations on the surface of the skin (Hertenstein & Weiss, Citation2011, p. 254).
7 Stroking and tapping (active forms of touch) involve proprioception, i.e., stimulation of deeper tissue (Hertenstein & Weiss, Citation2011, p. 254). Passive and active types of touch provide for perceptually different (proprioceptional or cutaneous) experiences.
8 Given that “a sense of living self” is anchored in “tactile-kinesthetic life” (perceptions and motility of an infant) (Sheets-Johnstone, Citation2002, p. 139), exploration of the corporeal aspects of young child-adult interactions can provide an avenue for more fully considering “the ontogenetic development” of corporeal subjects (p. 139; Meyer et al., Citation2017).