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Simple massage in the classroom allows children to get in touch with each other—and themselves.
by Clare La Plante
Photography by Susanna Stinnett
In 2003, Connecticut Center for Massage Therapy (CCMT) instructor Linda Derick was grilling dinner on a warm December night in Andover, Connecticut with a colleague who was in town to guest lecture. Afterwards, talk turned to their craft. Her colleague turned to her and said, “There’s something I want you to see.”
He popped in a 10-minute tape from Axelsons Gymnastika Institute in Stockholm, Sweden of children practicing Peaceful Touch, the Axelson-developed system that incorporates healthy touch in classrooms in the form of basic Swedish massage, letter, number and story games, and other simple touches.
Axelsons’ director, Hans Axelson, had developed Peaceful Touch some 10 years earlier based on research that showed that nurturing touch for children elicits a similar response as breast-feeding does in babies, releasing oxytocin, the feel-good “cuddle hormone,” which promotes empathy, calmness and concentration. Today, more than 300,000 students in Europe have been recipients of Peaceful Touch, and it’s rare to find a preschool in Sweden that doesn’t implement it.
But back in 2003 it was new to Derick, and as the images of young children rubbing each other’s backs came on her television screen, she started to cry. “I thought: ‘This is very important,’” she says.
As a massage educator, Derick knows the complexities of professional touch—the techniques, experience and wisdom required before a massage therapist can work on a client. And yet, here she was, watching these children skillfully—and effectively—touch each other.
“What they were doing wasn’t scientific, and wasn’t skilled and wasn’t riddled with issues,” she says. It looked, she says, as natural as wiping a friend’s tears away, or putting a hand on a shoulder. “I think my tears were about how far away our culture is, and how profoundly easy and simple touch can be.”
Making It Work in a Phobic Society
Although massage therapy has long been proven to be beneficial to children (visit www6.miami.edu/touchresearch/research.htm for more information), modalities such as Peaceful Touch—where teachers facilitate children touching other children with simple, nurturing strokes—is a revolution of sorts.
It’s cropping up around the world under different names and slightly different methods, pioneered by massage therapists who are teaching educators, parents and early child care providers how to get back in touch with our children.
The results are clear: Healthy touch, which is what we’ll call it here, helps foster attachment; decrease aggression, depression and anxiety; and helps children identify healthy touch so they are less vulnerable to abuse, and less likely to be prematurely sexually active.
That it’s happening in the middle of our current low-touch culture is a minor miracle. “What I think we don’t understand in this culture is that withholding touch from children from fear is as physically and emotionally harmful to children as harmful touch is,” says Frances M. Carlson, author of Essential Touch: Meeting the Needs of Young Children.
Nicole Mann, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based massage therapist who is an abuse survivor, agrees. She remembers being asked to talk about her personal experiences with touch while in massage school. When Mann finally shared her story with others, she was astonished to hear that several other female students were also abuse survivors.
“I started thinking, ‘Why are those who have been abused as children not talking about it? How do we reach kids in the general population who are being abused and not saying anything—or perhaps don’t even know what is happening to them?’” she says.
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