Babie's Love Language: Physical Touch?

“Relationships don’t have to be complicated.” “Discover your love language and strengthen your relationships”. “Use your knowledge about love languages to experience greater joy and harmony in all of your relationships.”

Those are only a few examples of how media is convincing us that getting to know more about the way we express and receive love will revolutionize our love life.

What about babies?

Still, while everyone is trying to find out if he or she prioritizes quality time, words of affirmation or physical touch, little is talked about how babies receive love or even beyond that, how certain love languages can affect a baby’s development. Thus, recent research on touch and children’s exploratory behaviour finally gives insights in the ways physical touch can not only make children feel loved but also water their growing in significant ways.

“NEVER ever kiss a baby on the mouth,unless you want to become ill!”, that’s what they drummed into parents within the 1920s. Research findings within that time indicated, that parents should rather be thrifty when it comes to touching their baby.

Why? Because you don’t want your baby to have ants in its pants and become restless! If you can’t keep your hands from your baby, however, you should at least abstain from rocking, tossing or tickling your baby and instead hold it in a quiet position.Sounds sobering? Well, thank god those researchers changed their mind a few years later!

How does physical touch help your baby grow?

Indeed, more and more research findings have made clear, that touching babies is in fact nothing harmful, but rather the opposite -quite beneficial! For example, studies with babies born prematurely have shown that massaging babies helps with weight gain and strengthens the immune system. Recently, children’s exploratory behaviour has gained more attention in touch research. By exploratory behaviour, a child’s initiative to find about more about its environment is meant. As prior research with animals such as research investigating the relationship between maternal touch and social attention indicated that there may be an association between touch and exploration, more and more researchers have become interested in testing this connectivity. But does touch even have to do with exploration? Well, researchers assume that there could be two different ways of parental touch influencing exploratory behaviour. On one hand,gently touching a baby could symbolize safety, within which the child is shows more bravery to explore. On the otherhand, the relationship can be caused by the child’s willingness to imitate its caregiver.

How does touch foster exploration?

A recent study has focused on examining exactly this relationship. Previous research on the first assumption showed that higher experienced safety goes hand in handwith lower cortisol levels, thus less stress for the baby. Simultaneously, the second approach could be explained by higher oxytocin levels leading to more social imitation. To sum up, in both cases, touch seems to influence a baby’s hormone levels. So, here’s how the research team used that information to study therelationship between touch and exploration: The babies’ hormone levels were assessed two times – oncebefore they received paternal touch and once afterwards. The touch itself was measured by observation by the researchers and questionnaires that the parents had to fill out. Ultimately, they wanted to investigate, whether the amount of touch and its subsequent change in hormone levels would improve social learning in the child. Therefore, a specific task, where children need to identify social stimuli within diverse ones, was used. Unfortunately, no effects of touch on hormone levels or social learning were found. However, infant cortisol levels prior to the touch indicated how much touch the caregivers used. So even tough touch didn’t reduce stress in that particular study, parents seem to react with touch on increased stress.

Take Home

So, to come back to the question if babies love language is physical touch,one need to commit that most probably, that’s something individual that varies from baby to baby. Nevertheless, recent psychology suggests that touch can help a baby to grow in a healthy way. Also, caregivers seem to use touch systematically to reduce babies stress levels. So the next time you think that adulting is soup and you are a fork, remember that actually you are doing great in giving your baby what it needs!

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