News Touch As Nutrition (article)

[Chava]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kindness-blog/touch-as-nutrition_b_6530658.html?1424719721

Interesting...sort of a theme of my week and some of the stuff I'm trying to work out in therapy. Very early contact was not good and it's crippling me now. Working consciously on simple things like hugging my dog.

"The necessity of nurturing touch is very clear when we are at our youngest. Link Removed, though they are provided with food and medicine.

....Children actively shape their sense of self, not just mentally, but with their hands, elbows and knees, their bellies and mouths, inside the frequency, textures and intensities of this constant, rich field of contact.

(This is why non-nurturing, violent or invasive touch can be so devastating for a child, because it does harm right in the deep heartland of a child's emerging identity.)"

 

[Friday]

In school we read through a lot of the Russian Orphanage Studies on touch. My understanding is that there is a cultural inhibition against raising other people's children.. So even in orphanages infants are only touched to the bare minimum possible (changing diapers, changing clothes). Failure to Thrive is normal, even when all other aspects of care are met (warmth, shelter, food, water, etc.). It rocked developmental & physiological psych worlds when those studies were published. More Developmental than Physiological (physiological psych -also known as neurological psych- takes the "yes" option more often than not. Meaning in the nature v nurture? Yes. This or that? Yes. A or B? Yes. As the driving principle is: if it's physiological it's psychological, and if it's psychological it's physiological... You can't separate the two. One always always always feeds into the other.)

 

[Fred Derry]

I believe a touch, wanted or unwanted, given or withheld, has the potential to elevate or destroy a child's soul.

One of my daughters reminded me of something I told her over 20 years ago. She was about five and we were in a waiting room when another mother entered with a girl about the same age. It was a long wait and my girl kept hopping on my lap and generally lounging on me like... well like a five year old. I in turn stroked her hair, scratched her back, etc.

At some point, I absentmindedly whispered to my girl, how sad it was the other mommy didn't love her little girl. My daughter was shocked and wanted to know how I knew. I told her it was because the other mother never touched her baby. The whole time we waited, she never touched her baby once.

 

[Eleanor]

Wow, a profound article. Thank you for that. Different cultures have such different practices around touching. I remember when I lived in Morocco for a while it was a very "touchy" culture. People held hands a lot, everyone kissed and hugged upon meeting. You sit on the couch to eat, so you sit right next to each other.... Touch is crucial. Pets take some of the load I think for a lot of people...

 

[Chava]

True @Eleanor , I did not grow up in a touchy culture, but all babies need contact. No contact or hurtful contact = both terrible.

@FridayJones , that's horrible. I hadn't heard that bit about the orphanages, but doesn't surprise me. I assume most of us have heard about the baby monkeys who had a cuddly fake mom and a cold, wire fake mom that had food? The cuddly contact is almost more important than basic survival (food) for little ones, even monkeys. It's really bizarre how little we understand about early childhood. We think babies aren't this wonderfully complex and loving being right from the beginning. And pretty crappy maternity leave benefits in this country.

I hug my dog sort of like I'm a robot...he loves contact and isn't picky if I'm not genuinely feeling it. Lately I'm trying to hug him and notice what I feel from it, like not just for his sake but for mine. It feels like learning foreign language. Luckily he has high energy needs that I can meet very well...he's not extremely cuddly but he has reminded me of the importance of contact and touch. Sometimes he just NEEDS to be pet....does the elbow-butting with his head, saying, "PET ME NOW!" He doesn't care if I rub his ears or his shoulders, I just have to make contact and he's all good. To me, that makes him very real and I'm honestly humbled by his blatant awareness of his needs.

Okay, I know it's not a pet post but I'm trying to evolve from stuffed animals, so going in a positive direction I think..

 

[Friday]

@Chava... Yeah, the overwhelming problem with early childhood development is that in order to learn what happens when very bad things happen? Very bad things have to happen. Few scientists outside of Hitler's are willing to experiment on babies and young children to find out how f*cked up they get if you torture them in different ways.

Socialized medicine countries help solid research tremendously because one is able to look at generations over the decades (longitudinally) in natural environments instead of a laboratory, with hundreds of thousands of subjects in the study. ((As opposed to a "big" study in the US, with maybe 6,000 over a "long" period of time, like 5 years)). Some amaaaaazing data has come out of Sweden

(tangent: From one of those Swedish longitudinal studies: girls dieting & exercise during puberty isn't just correlated, but causal to struggling with being 20-30pounds overweight until menopause! OMFG!!! That's crazy! Causal happens in medicine more often than anywhere else, but it's still pot of gold at the end of a rainbow rare. But 3 total generations, and 2 partial -haven't hit menopause, yet- with hundreds of thousands of girls & women? Those who dieted & exercised to lose weight during puberty, struggled with being 20-30lbs overweight, meanwhile girls/women who did nothing about the sudden "pudge" that happens (15-20lbs, what used to be called 'baby fat') the year before onset of menses? Weight melted off all on it's own with no effort on their part whatsoever. Some later had weight problems that were easily linked to other causes : injury, depression, meds, genetics -aka started the study morbidly obese- etc. But none, not even any outliers, struggled with 20-30lbs from puberty to menopause, except those who dieted & increased exercise during that year. One of my professors was using that study as the basis to try and find if it's hormonal -his area of expertise- or a genetic switch that gets flipped -one of the other researchers on his team-. He put us all to work grant-writing for him, so we had to quote that study left, right, and forwards for a whole semester. But so, so, soooooo many of the studies that come out of various EU countries are turning the medical world upside down. Crazy amazing data to be mined!)

So, too... Cultural Sociology/Anthropology & Medicine/Psych can make use of pre-existing conditions (like the Russian Orphanage Studies, or the Mufasa Gang in -Now I forget the country- in Africa) to mine data as to what happens when XYZ happens. Failure to thrive, attachment disorders, psychopathy... Oh my! Are all correlated to neglect in infancy. Only correlated, though, not causal... As perfectly neurotypocal kids/adults come out of the same environment. There are both moral dilemmas (stand by? Really? And do nothing in the face of terrible things?) in this kind of research as well as pragmatic ones (like the women who developed and immunity to HIV, and no matter how many times they were exposed did not contract it... Until they were taken off the streets, and after a few months no longer hooking, all lost their immunity, and developed HIV.)

 

[Chava]

Very interesting. Yes it's hard stuff to research but it does feel like too many people want the easy research topics. We also spend too much money researching medications and not other alternatives. The whole body approach to PTSD is way under-studied so far. It's crazy. But drugs, benzos, opiates, etc are fine (and for many people they are, but I can become a good drug addict in 2 days).

Anyway, I read about this somewhere too how we can't totally research early trauma well because NO, it's not okay to traumatize kids and see what happens. But I respect the efforts at research around these obvious limitations.