Good Touch
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.3 Since then, lack of touch in childhood has been implicated in pathologies from ecsema to anorexia.4
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 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 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 neglible 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.6
Anthropologists concur that America is an exceedingly “low-touch,” high-violence culture.7 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.
Recent fierce contests over sexuality can be read as disputes over the meaning 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 say no: in fact, such relaxed family touch and sight are usually found to be benign or even propitious to later sexual development.9 Yet, in these conservative times, many popular advice columnists counsel parents against them, just in case.
Even people who are skeptical about the claims of “oversexualizing” touch cannot entirely ignore them. Parents and teachers know they could face real legal trouble, including the loss of a job, reputation, or even the custody of a child if they engage in innocent but unorthodox practices, such as breast feeding past toddlerhood or photographing children nude.
More pernicious, adults begin to suspect themselves of deviance when they enjoy the touch of a child’s body. In the early 1990s, a Syracuse, New York, mother was picked up by police and briefly jailed after she phoned a local hotline because she was panicked by the slight arousal she felt while nursing her daughter.11
Not only parents, but teachers too have been terrorized about touching by the child-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s that began with false allegations of abuse by teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Bakerfield, California. Preschool teacher Richard Johnson was just starting his career in Hawaii when the papers began to fill with stories of bizarre sexual torture at other schools.
“What a stifling effect this moral panic held over a young male teacher who until this time worried mostly about establishing warm, trusting relationships with all the children in his care,” Johnson wrote. “I started to worry and second-guess myself when I went about my once taken-for-granted routines of changing diapers, wiping runny noses, unbuttoning and buttoning a two-year-old’s ‘Button Down 501’ jeans . . . I wondered about holding and attempting to calm an out-of-control three-year-old in a ‘football hold,’ as I was skillfully instructed to do during my master’s practica. Suddenly, the sense of touch, which has always been such an integral part of my relationship with children (my own and others I care for) was being called into question.” Johnson became increasingly demoralized as he saw such paranoia harden into policy, and he finally left the classroom.
Although most of the earlier sex-abuse convictions of day-care providers have been overturned (and all have been discredited), that terrified and terrifying period left an enduring legacy: a body of policy at all educational levels to guard against even the appearance of sexual touch in school. If student teachers take any courses in child sexuality, they place more emphasis on abuse than on unremarkable child development. As a result, young teachers are on the qui vive for pathology. “My students, who are in their twenties, are shocked when a five-year-old reaches for a teacher’s breast. They think he’s ‘oversexualized,’” Jonathan Silin, a professor of preschool education at New York’s Teacher’s College, told me. “They don’t realize this is a perfectly common normative behavior.” These students then get jobs at schools whose rules write those prejudices and misconceptions into “no-touch” policies forbidding male teachers from changing diapers or being alone with children and prohibiting caregivers, both male and female, from holding children in their laps while reading or even hugging a child who has fallen off a tricycle.14
Children, for their part, are trained to look for sexual malevolence in every adult touch. Programs such as the popular “good touch/bad touch” curricula have been shown to have no positive effects and plenty of negative ones. They reinforce kids’ prejudices against “bad” people (i.e., people of different races or those who wear ragged clothing) and raise general levels of anxiety, particularly in young children.15 A kindergartener refused to utter a word to her new teacher for weeks. Why? She’d been taught not to speak to strangers.16 Not surprisingly, the programs make children especially wary of sex, teaching them, in the words of psychologist Bonnie Trudell, that “sexuality is essentially secretive, negative, and even dangerous.”17 They may even make children wary of their own parents. “We’re in the kitchen,” said a Chicago mother of a preschooler, “and Celia says, ‘Don’t touch my body, Daddy. Don’t touch my vagina.’ And I said, ‘Geez, where’d she get this from?’” She’d gotten it from school.
Richard Johnson is a member of a small but growing group of educators intent on turning this trend around. The group’s writing, collected by Joseph Tobin, a professor of early-childhood education at the University of Hawaii, into an anthology called Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education, constitutes a powerful, often emotional critique of “no-touch” teaching. Reading it, one is left with the strong feeling that too little touch may be just as harmful as or worse than too much—whatever “too much” means—and that the losers are both adults and children.
This chapter advocates a “sensual education” for children at home and at school. And education in the body’s physical responses can and should be mostly autodidactic, but adults play a crucial role. That role consists of two parts. The first, active, part is to touch children lovingly, though never intrusively, throughout their childhoods, including adolescence, and to transmit in word and deed the messages that pleasure is a good thing but that touching others must be done with their consent. The second, perhaps more difficult job involves restraint—stepping back and “making a place” for children’s autonomous sensual and sexual pleasure. In that space, children of all ages may engage in masturbation without shame and consensual child-with-child sexual touching without adult interference. As they get older and their sexuality becomes more purposeful, genitally focused, and orgasm-directed, they may explore “outercourse,” the techniques of nonpenetrative sexual pleasuring with one another, and finally engage in protected penetrative sex. Information on the pleasurable parts and practices of the body should be freely available but not forced on any child.
Contrary to popular notions, veteran teachers say, today’s preschoolers are no more interested in sex than preschoolers of the past few decades (when there was less television), though there’s some evidence that toddlers who go to school play at sex more than those who don’t go to school.24 My own hypothesis on this last point: Day-care kids have more opportunities for partners and are generally more worldly than their stay-at-home peers; and because they are more exposed to the scrutiny of adults, their behavior is reported more frequently. In any case, the researchers who discovered the greater-than-average activity found no ill effects.25
The adult rush to name and judge can come to an ironic end. “Our terror about sex actually ‘sexualizes’ behaviors that aren’t sexual,” said Tobin. At the same time, if adults fear so much that nonerotic touch might be construed as erotic, they shy away from holding or caressing children, especially as they get older. That deprives the children of sensual touch and teaches them to refrain from it as they enter adulthood. In this way, kids learn to associate touch only with sex, to the point where they may seek sex early when what they really want is emotional and bodily intimacy. As adults, they may become unable to express love and intimacy except sexually.30
Children need help learning to control their bodily impulses and negotiate consent, the same way they must learn to share toys, follow the rules of a game, refrain from hitting, and express compassion. But we don’t need to interpret for children everything about touch, because they already have their own, perfectly legitimate ideas. “We need to get over this idea that kids are empty and need to be filled with the wisdom of adults,” said Jonathan Silin, of Teacher’s College.
Illustrating this principle, educator Sue Montford related the story of a three-year-old boy in a day-care class. “This little guy said he was going to marry so-and-so, a little girl in the class.” Oh yes? the teacher inquired, leaving room for him to elaborate. “First I’m going to kiss her, then lay her down on my cot, take off her diaper, and put her in big-girl pants,” the child explained. The teacher might have become upset when the boy got to the part about taking off her diapers; she might have interpreted his idea of touching the other child’s naked body as sexual, even perverse. Instead, she let him tell his story his own way—and understood it his way. “To him, that was the ritual of marriage,” which “meant getting older, being a grown-up”—just like being toilet trained. Commented Montford: “It could be so helpful if adults would just listen to the understanding and knowledge children already have and come to them where they are.”
Certainly some would argue that teaching kids all this fancy stuff will turn them on so much they will want to do nothing but have sex. And this will push them into intercourse even faster.
Experience suggests otherwise. In Europe, for instance, some sex education actually includes lessons in the varieties of sexual expression … In much of Western Europe, teens initiate intercourse at about the same age as here.35 Adult couples who learn to enjoy nonintercourse pleasures tend to not have intercourse every time they make love.
Outercourse is safer sex, and the skills it teaches make intercourse, if it happens, safer too. If a young couple is having enough pleasure without intercourse, they can postpone that decision indefinitely. In the meantime, many kinds of outercourse are virtually without risk of pregnancy or STD or HIV transmission (oral and anal sex can pass certain viruses and bacteria, however, and unprotected anal intercourse poses the highest risk of HIV transmission, so condoms are recommended for these practices). Much of outercourse—mutual masturbation, bathing together, kissing—is 100 percent risk-free.
3 – Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row/Perennial, 1986), 97-99.
4 – Madtrulika Gupa et al., “Perceived Touch Deprivation and Body Image: Some Observations among Eating Disordered and Non-Clinical Subjects,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 39 (May 1995): 459-64.
6 – James W. Prescott, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence,” Futurist (April 1975): 66.
7 – Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper/Colophon Books, 1951), 180.
9 – Robin J. Lewis and Louis H. Janda, “The Relationship between Adult Sexual Adjustment and Childhood Experiences Regarding Exposure to Nudity, Sleeping in the Parental Bed, and Parental Attitudes toward Sexuality,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 17, no. 4 (1988): 349-62; Paul Okami, “Childhood Exposure to Parental Nudity, Parent-Child Co-Sleeping, and ‘Primal Scenes’: A Review of Clinical Opinion and Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Sex Research 32, no. 1 (1995): 51-64.
11 – Tamar Lewin, “Breast-Feeding: How Old is Too Old?” New York Times, February 18, 2001, “Week in Review.”
14 – Joseph Tobin, ed., Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
15 – N. Dickson Reppucci and Jeffrey J. Haugaard, “Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse: Myth or Reality,” American Psychologist 44 (October 1989): 1266.
16 – J. Garbarino, “Children’s Response to a Sexual Abuse Prevention Program: A Study of the Spiderman Comic,” Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal 11 (1987): 143-48.
17 – Bonnie Trudell and M. Whatley, “School Sexual Abuse Prevention: Unintended Consequences and Dilemmas,” Child Abuse and Neglect 12 (1988): 108.
24 & 25 – William N. Friedrich and Patricia Grambsch, “Child Sexual Behavior Inventory: Normative and Clinical Comparison,” Psychological Assessment 4 (1992): 303-11.
30 – Nancy Blackman, “Pleasure and Touching: Their Significance in the Development of the Preschool Child,” paper delivered at the International Symposium on Childhood Sexuality, Montreal, September 1979.
35 – Advocates for Youth, “Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.” (2001).
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