Your child knows exactly who you are. As infants and children cry uncontrollably out of pain, hunger, or a sense of danger, their immediate calm reaction to being picked up by their mother is no coincidence. A breakthrough study in 1993 discovered that mothers can recognize who their infants are by just touch (Kaitz et al. 1993). This discovery has since been built upon as it has been found that infants develop the ability to recognize who their mothers are through physical interaction, or touch (Bigelow & Williams 2020). This impressive biological ability shared between children and their mothers is not only an amazing communication method, but also a means of development of healthy stress regulation in children. This construct of tactile communication may be far more important to your child’s development than previously known. A recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal “Developmental Psychobiology”, suggests positive physical interaction, or touch, between mothers and their children goes beyond short-term infancy to influence long-term stress reactivity and regulation through childhood development.
Conducted by a team of scientists, the study titled “A mother’s touch: Preschool-aged children are regulated by positive maternal touch” builds upon previous works surrounding the topics of the maternal-child relationship and touch communication. The scientists of this study acknowledge previous works that emphasize the construct of touch being the main way that parents, especially mothers, communicate with their children (Barnett 2005). Additionally, the study refers to a 2005 study that coins the skin as the “social organ” as it is just as capable of communication as words are (Morrison et al. 2005). In conjunction with the idea that skin is integral for preliminary communication between mothers and their children, the study further explores the idea that maternal touch plays an integral role in infant development in terms of immediate stress reduction in which mothers picking up, or cradling their infants, contributes to stress reduction (Barnett 2005). However, while taking these findings into account, the scientists behind this study go a step further in the field of maternal care to explore its untouched areas: “While the evidence is robust that maternal touch is beneficial for newborns, fewer studies have examined its importance in the later years” (Scott et al. 2022, para 3). Through its experimental design, the study aims to observe the effects maternal touch has on long-term childhood development rather than just immediate response to touch.
“A mother’s touch: Preschool-aged children are regulated by positive maternal touch”, has been published in the peer-reviewed journal “Developmental Psychobiology. Written and conducted by a team of scientists led by Patricia A. Smiley of Pomona College, the study hypothesizes that “the association between positive maternal touch and lower acute stress reactivity will hold when touch is provided in early childhood” (Scott et al. 2022, para 11). Through an experimental method that collected both observations and data, the scientists utilized measured salivary cortisol levels to perceive correlation between maternal touch and stress. By observing the effects that varying types of maternal touch have on children in terms of their stress levels during varying tasks, the scientists believed they could further understand the importance of certain parental techniques, especially how they contribute to child development.
To conduct the study, researchers constructed their sample, of mothers and their children, through a voluntary sampling method by posting fliers and online posts in Southern California. The sample consisted of 114 mothers, with a mean age of 33.52 years. The children of the 114 mothers had a mean age of 41.68 months. The only requirement of the mothers was that they were proficient in English. While their children were present, each of the mothers were tasked to speak about a time they felt rejected by their child. The mothers were recorded for nine minutes total and their interactions with their children while discussing the topic were observed and categorized as negative, neutral, or positive by the scientists.
Utilizing previous findings that various forms of skin-to-skin contact, including maneuvering, continued contact, and discrete touch, can have varying regulatory effects on children, the scientists created a comprehensive list of interactions that constituted each type of touch (Brummelman et al. 2019). Negative touch included physical restraint, manipulation of the child’s body with force, and restricting the child’s physical motion; neutral touch included motion redirection, placing the child on their own lap, and patting the child; positive touch included hugging, hand holding, and continued contact (Scott et al. 2022, 4).
Each of the 114 children were then placed in an area separate from their mothers and individually shown a neutral then scary video (a four-minute clip from Fantasia [1940]), followed by two frustrating tasks (stressor tasks): drawing a perfect green circle for three and a half minutes and opening a toy box with an incorrect key for four-minutes. To measure the children’s stress reactivity levels, salivary cortisol levels were measured through four saliva samples from each child: one baseline sample before beginning the videos and activities, the second after the stressor tasks, the third after 30 minutes of the stressor tasks, and the fourth 45 minutes after the stressor tasks. Salivary cortisol is a reliable indicator of stress as during times of high stress. The sympathetic nervous system which is responsible for humans’ “fight or flight” response releases the steroid hormone cortisol from the adrenal cortex to keep the body on high alert (Thau et al. 2019). The samples of salivary cortisol analyze cortisol levels in the children’s saliva. Utilizing the nine-minute coded video and analyzed salivary cortisol levels, the team of scientists observed a correlation between types of touch and stress reactivity in the children.
The study’s hypothesis was supported by the results of the study. A negative correlation was found between increased positive maternal touch and stress reactivity levels. Children who were observed to have received positive physical touch from their mothers in the coded videos experienced lower stress reactivity, or in other words experienced less stress as a result of the scary video and frustrating tasks. On the other hand, children who experienced negative physical touch from their mothers displayed higher levels of stress reactivity due to the activities of the experiment.
The importance of these results reaches beyond the study and into the parenting dynamic of each family. In familial settings, while earning income is vital, oftentimes childcare is given up by parents to third party services for the parents to work longer hours for their children. However, this process of foregoing time with children for the child’s betterment is evidently counterintuitive. It is vital that parents place emphasis on prioritizing time for physical interaction with their children to effectively develop their stress and self-regulation processes. With the results of this study indicating maternal touch’s positive, and arguably necessary effects on child development and stress reactivity, families must be proactive in their efforts to physically engage with their children.
The broader implications the study holds are related to parental practices for the sake of their child’s or children’s development. Parents, and especially mothers, should take the time to spend physical time with their children to better understand them while simultaneously contributing to their development. Mothers’ time devoted to active engagement with their children will benefit their children’s ability to regulate stress from an early age. In an ever-busy and fast paced world, stressors seem to affect a child before they realize that it is a stressor; for example, the film clip and stressor tasks of the study led by Smiley increased stress levels of the children. Stress, a problem not addressed as much in the past compared to now, has been dubbed the “health epidemic of the 21st century,” by the World Health Organization (Fink 2016, para. 1). It is the responsibility of parents, specifically mothers, to responsibly prepare their children to regulate stress through just spending positive physical time with them. Giving children the strength to better deal with this increasingly prevalent problem through simple practices early on will immensely benefit them as they continue to develop.
While these broader implications of the study are important, the ethicality and possible flaws of the study must be considered to ensure its credibility. From an ethical standpoint, some may argue that the children in this study did not give their consent to the study while their mothers did. However, the construct of informed assent was actively followed by the scientists through this study, a process that allows the children, because they are minors, to demonstrate agreement to participate in the study. Moreover, the study was approved by the Institutional Review Board, effectively certifying the study’s protocols as safe for its participants and ethical. A potential flaw of the voluntary sampling method relates to the construction of a diverse sample as the sample was not randomly created; however, the study lists out the distribution of ethnicities of the mothers and their children: “40.7% White, 31.0% more than one race (including Latinx), 9.7% Latinx only, 10.6% Asian or Asian American, 5.3% more than one race (other than Latinx), 1.8% African American only, and 0.9% American Indian or Alaska Native only” (Scott et al. 2022, para. 14). The sample is diverse with the presence of various ethnicities and the study is transparent of their distinct proportions.
This riveting study fills in several gaps within the understanding of maternal care. While it was previously found that maternal touch is important during infancy as a means of communication, the work done by Patricia A. Smiley and her team demonstrated that positive physical interaction between mothers and children is paramount through childhood. The time spent interacting with children directly contributes to a child’s development of stress management. With being dubbed as the “health epidemic of the 21st century”, mothers must utilize this information and these empirically based findings to prioritize positive physical interaction to benefit their child’s development of healthy stress regulation.
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