Nov 24, 2019
We are Not Touching Enough and It is Killing Us
Why do babies die?
I am sorry to begin on such a somber note, but you will soon see its purpose, please think about it for a moment: What are the most likely reasons for a baby dying?
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Science tells us there are three primary answers to this question: Medical complications, malnutrition, and neglect.
You probably guessed babies are most likely to die from medical or nutritional complications, but what exactly is neglect?
As any dictionary will tell, to be neglected is to be ignored.
So are babies dying from their coos and babbles being ignored; or their emails or Snap Chats or Facebook updates not being replied to quickly enough?
Not quite.
Instead, the truest form of neglecting a baby is not touching it.
Babies’ needs for touch are as great, if not more than their needs for medical care and food.
Let’s visit the infant and under the age of five mortality rates for the United States — bearing in mind these mortality rates are an indicator of a country’s medical accessibility, food abundance, and level of touching.
The United States ranks 57 out of 220 countries in infant mortality rates and 30 out of 34 countries in under five mortality rates — despite the United States being the #1 country for medical research and development and the most abundant country for food exports.
Hmm, if the United States is the highest ranked country in the world for medical care and food — yet it poorly ranks in infant and child mortality rates — what does this say about the United States in as far as it neglecting its infants and children?
For answers to this question, let’s go back in time, more than 120 years, and meet the man who’s written the best-selling book in America about infant and child rearing…
It is 1894 and Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, one of America’s first and finest pediatricians has just published his book, The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses.
The Care and Feeding of Children soon becomes the standard child rearing text in America — and continues to be for the next 50 years. In it, Holt makes clear that parents spoil their children by cuddling and holding them — good parenting, Holt argues, is “hands-off” parenting:
“Babies under six months should never be played with: and the less of it at any time, the better for the infant. They are made nervous and irritable, sleep badly and suffer from indigestion.”
The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses
Luther Emmett Holt, 1894
By opinion and authority alone, Dr. Holt creates a near touchless American society.
But within just a few years, doctors across America begin noticing dramatic increases in infant deaths — particularly in seemingly healthy babies — that is, babies who were getting their medical and nutritional needs met.
One of those doctors was named Benjamin Spock. Like Holt, Dr. Spock was an American pediatrician, but his ideas about childcare were anything but what Holt argued; Spock argued parents should be flexible with their infants and children, treat them as individuals, and above all-else be affectionate with them.
His book, Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, influenced infant and child rearing practices in America for the next 50 years. But like Holt’s arguments, Spock’s arguments were based upon conjecture and anecdotes — and not upon scientific research or empirical data.
The first systematic research on the effects of touching infants was performed by Austrian psychoanalyst Rene Spitz.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Spitz researched babies — less than one year of age, who were being raised in orphanages.
And he found infant mortality rates within these orphanages to be as high as 70%.
Yes, that means 7 out of every 10 infants being raised in orphanages died before their first birthday. Unfortunately, mortality rates like these within orphanages continued into the 21st century in China, Romania, Russia, and various countries within Africa.
Before Spitz’s data, it was not uncommon for researchers to report such epidemically high infant mortality rates. However, Spitz, was the first to hypothesize these mortality rates were due to babies not being touched and had nothing to do with poor medical care or malnutrition.
The scientific community was skeptical of Spitz’s hypothesis to the point of dismissing the idea that touch can have as much of an impact on an organism’s health as medical care and food.
To address this skepticism, a bio-psychologist named Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin designed a scientific experiment to test Spitz’s hypothesis.
Harlow’s experiment had Rhesus monkeys acting as the participants. Shortly after their birth, Harlow deprived Rhesus monkeys of their mother’s touch for as long as one year.
If Spitz’s hypothesis was correct, then the lack of the mother’s touch would have negative effects on the monkeys’ development even though they were otherwise medically healthy, well fed, and properly cared for…
What did Harlow find?
When compared to being raised by their mothers, Rhesus monkeys raised without their mothers — analogous to the infants being raised in orphanages — had higher mortality rates; and if they did survive, they had significant physical deficits, like being sicklier and smaller in stature; and psychological deficits like not being able to incorporate new objects into their environments; and they lacked psychosocial skills.
Specifically, Harlow stated, monkeys that physically survived, exhibited autistic-like behaviors and were unable to form intimate pair-bonding — which he argued, is the basis of love.
Spitz’s hypothesis about touch being a requirement for life, now had scientific proof. And upon further experiments, using surrogate mothers composed of soft terrycloth, Harlow found normal physical and psychological development is less about a mother’s touch per se and more about a contact-comfort touch.
A contact-comfort touch is a soft, warm, and yielding touch. Anyone, repeat, anyone can give contact-comfort touches. They are typically skin-to-skin touches and often occur when people are massaging or caressing one another. The prototypical contact-comfort touch is what occurs between a mother and infant during breast feeding.
It has always been assumed the benefits of breast feeding are solely due to the breast milk itself, but now scientists are starting to believe these benefits are not only about the chemistry of breast milk but also about the contact-comfort touches occurring during breastfeeding.
Asian countries have known the benefits of touching their infants a bit longer than us in the United States have; China first introduced infant massage 2,200 years ago — and India, Bangladesh, and Nepal have been systematically massaging their infants since their countries’ inceptions.
Standing upon the shoulders of this ancient Asian perspective and Harlow’s initial empirical data, the most advanced and cutting-edge medical centers today have birthing plans that systematically incorporate touching between mothers and infants as soon as babies are born.
There appears to be a critical period from birth to about two years of age in which contact-comfort touches have the greatest physical and psychosocial benefits on the developing human.
This is not to say we should stop touching one another after two years of age, but we do know that contact-comfort touches during these first two years of life are associated with healthy weight and height gains; sleep-wake patterns; motor development; emotional bonding; and lower mortality rates.
Which officially brings us full circle and back to infant mortality rates.
We know historically, scientifically, culturally, and intuitively: Touch. Is. Life.
Beyond the cutting-edge medical centers, what are we, today, doing with all this knowledge about the significance of touch?
We are growing physically further apart from one another and touching one another less than we ever have in our recorded history.
Why?!
There are a lot of reasons: technology, jobs, the Internet, a changing economy…
What-ever the reasons may be, it is time we all began reaching out and touching someone — whether it be family, friends, or accepting strangers.
Because if we do not, history is clear in showing us the biological — sickness, disease, and death; psychological — loss of intimacy, learning, and life satisfaction; and sociological — dichotomous discourses, psychosocial disconnections, and violent ramifications.
References
Gallace, A., & Spence, C. (2010). The Science of Interpersonal Touch: An Overview. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 34, 246–259.
Harlow, H. F., & Suomi, S. J. (1971). Social Recovery by Isolation-Reared Monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 68, 1534–1538.
Nelson, C. A., Fox, N. A., & Zeanah, C. H. (2014). Romania’s abandoned children: Deprivation, brain development, and the struggle for recovery. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Spitz, R. A. (1945). Hospitalism. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
Spitz, R. A. (1946). Hospitalism, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2, 113–117.
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Don Lucas is a Professor of Psychology and head of the Psychology Department at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio Texas. He loves psychology, teaching, and research.
If you like this story, then check out Don’s videos on his YouTube channel, 5MIweekly: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQFQ0vPPNPS-LYhlbKOzpFw/featured, follow him on Instagram @5MIweekly, and like him on Facebook: http://fb.me/5MIWeekly
