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1 The Effect of Culture on Mother-Child Tactile Communication Author(s): Vidal S. Clay Source: The Family Coordinator, Vol. 17, No. 3, (Jul., 1968), pp Published by: National Council on Family Relations Stable URL: Accessed: 11/05/ :28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

2 The Effect of Culture On Mother-Child Tactile Communication* VIDAL S. CLAY** A field study of the normal tactile interpersonal behaviors of forty-five motherchild pairs in a public, recreational setting. No phase of high tactile contact between mothers and children was evident. Mothers met the children's basic needs for food, tactile comfort and safety. All mothers gave less tactile communication to their youngest children than they gave to their just-walking ones. Tactile contact declined from this peak on. Mothers were most active in the areas of Control and Nursing; much less frequent were Play, Affection, Comfort, and Anger. Most of the childinitiated contacts were of the affectionate attachment kind. Tactile communication has been a relatively neglected area of psychological interest, yet it plays a crucial role in all human relationships. It appears to be biologically essential to the human being in the first four months of life; throughout the life cycle it is physically and psychologically useful in returning the individual to normal functioning after experiencing stress; and finally, it is the main avenue through which the human need for intimacy and acceptance is satisfied. The lack of interest in this fundamental modality can be viewed as an indication of a number of American attitudes. For example, there is the American preoccupation with words and with the articulated part of our culture; there is also the lack of concern with the subject of happiness as compared with the volume of problem literature; and finally, there is the attitude of prudery and anxiety about sexual matters which carries over into the tactile area because of the relationship between touch and sex. The Field Study In this culture tactile communication is * Paper adapted from one originally presented at 1967 Annual Meeting, National Council on Family Relations. Based on doctoral thesis completed at Teachers College, Columbia University, ** Lecturer in Child Development and Family Relations at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, Connecticut. a difficult area to research because most tactile communications occur in private and most tactile behavior is out of awareness. In order, therefore, to study the patterning of this communication modality, it was decided to do an exploratory field study which would be based on observations of the normal tactile or touch intercommunications of mothers and their preverbal children. The beach was selected as the site for the study because it is a popular place with mothers and small children, mothers can relax there, and more skin is customarily exposed there than in other public situations. A total of 45 observations were done, 15 for each of the three social classes. The children ranged in age from neonates to 4-year-olds. Each observation lasted one hour. Still photographs including both mother and child were taken at high speed whenever the subjects were physically touching one another; other behaviors and the time were recorded by written notes. Social class distinctions were made according to the location of the observations since beach populations tend to vary socioeconomically. Most of the upper class sample were observed at two private clubs, one a beach club and one a country club with swimming and wading pools. Most of the middle class were seen at a summer country club in a resort area which drew its members from a broad social base. The working class sample was observed at a 204 THE FAMILY COORDINATOR July 1968

3 public beach. Observations of association groupings noted over a summer and information about the occupation and education of the fathers were used to check the original social class assumptions. All the photographs of the tactile communications between mother and child were thoroughly studied for each case. The interpretation and information on these tactilisms were described in words and were integrated with the original protocol into a final typed record of each hour. A content analysis was made of the final 45 behavioral records. Categories of behavior were developed and the type and duration of each tactile contact were quantified. In analyzing the material the mother-tochild and the child-to-mother behavioral systems were kept separate. In the motherto-child system, six main areas of tactile behavior were analyzed: Nursing or Caretaking, Control, Comfort, Affection, Play, and Anger. Caretaking included the physical care of the child; Control included limiting his actions; Affection, Play, and Anger are self-explanatory. A word about Comfort: Comforting is the re-establishment of the child's emotional disquilibrium; it is a kind of emotional caretaking. In this age group, it is primarily a tactile function. Five categories were found in the childto-mother system: Contact, Affection, Play, Resistance, and Anger. Contact is a new category. The emotional behaviors of the small child are difficult to recognize because the proper cultural expression of emotion has not yet been learned. Contact included all the child's amorphous physical contacting acts. For the purposes of comparison, the 45 children were divided into four age groups of approximately equal size. The A group was made up of the infants and non-walkers; the B group, of the just-walkers; the C group, of the 2-year-olds; and the D group, of the 3- and 4-year-olds. Result of the Field Study The Mother-to-Child Agfectional System Tactile contact and age. Harlow (1961) describes three phases in the mother-child affectional system: a phase of maternal attachment, a phase of maternal protection, and a phase of maternal ambivalence. The maternal attachment phase is the time when the mother's tactile contacting needs are highest. This period includes the first 30 days of life for the monkey and approximately the first four months of life for the human. It is also the time when the baby requires the most mothering in order to survive. In the field study, therefore, one would expect to find the highest amount of tactile contact given to the youngest children, with this amount declining regularly with age. This was not the case. Three infants under four months of age were brought to the beach. All were carried in baby carriages. When they cried, their mothers picked them up and fed them bottles or changed their diapers. Sometimes they were rocked or patted. When they slept, they were put back to bed. One of the patterns that the study dramatically shows is the separation of the bodies of mother and child that occurs in American culture. From the time the child is born he is kept away from the mother in things like cribs, carriages, and baby carriers. When the infant is in distress or when it is the "right time," the mother goes to him to perform her essential mothering services, after which she returns him to his bed or play area. American mothers largely omit the phase of close bodily attachment. Yet Harlow says that this earlv period is the time when the mother's and the neonate's needs for sensory contact, sensory stimulation, and sensory communication seem to be the greatest. In the field study there was a sharp increase in the amount of tactile contact given the just-walking children as compared with the infants group. These children received the highest amount of tactile contact in the study. The majority of these contacts were of two kinds: first, taking care of young children and second, controlling their behavior. Far less frequent were tactilisms expressing love and attachment. From this peak on, tactile contact declined regularly with age. The just-walking child is a problem to take care of because he has not yet July 1968 THE FAMILY COORDINATOR 205

4 learned to be afraid of new situations or to understand verbal speech. American parents reward what has been called "desexualized" motor performance, and these children were allowed to wander almost at will, while their mothers kept a close watch on them or followed along behind. Tactile contact and sex. The girl children received more physical touches than the boys, and they were in physical contact with their mothers longer than the boys. Male and female infants were treated about the same. In the just-walking group, the mothers extended tactile contacts to their girl children, while the boys tended to initiate the contacts with their mothers. In the oldest group the contact was initiated by the child. The boys continued to direct physical contact to their mothers, while the girls used speech. These data support the conclusions reached by other researchers that American mothers express a greater physical closeness with their female children. Certainly the mothers of girls that were seen on the beach seemed to baby the little girls longer; they seemed to give them more bodily contact and closer physical supervision. Tactile contact and social class. In the field study as a whole, the working class mothers or mother surrogates touched their children nearly twice as often as the middle and upper class mothers, but the middle class mothers were in actual tactile contact with their children longer than the other mothers. When age and sex are held constant-the children in the working class sample were younger and were predominantly girls-the tactile frequency scores of the working class mothers were still higher, this difference being greater for the younger children. This high score seems to reflect the working class concern with cleanliness, control, and compliance. It may also have been affected by the following factors: the working class had more mother surrogates to care for their children, the working class families may have been less familiar with the beach-park area, the working class beach was actually less safe for small children than the other two beaches, and the working class mothers seemed to have the expectation that their children were surely headed for trouble. The duration of tactile contact. The middle class mothers spent more time in contact with their children of all ages than did the other mothers. For working and upper class mothers, tactile contact with their children declines from the time the child starts to walk. Walking may initiate the period of maternal ambivalence for these mothers because the ability to walk frees the child from his dependence on his mother and allows him to turn his attention to the larger world. The data on the high tactile duration scores for the middle class mothers could be interpreted as an indication of the prolongation of the period of maternal attachment so that their children are separated from them over a longer period of time and at a slower rate. Further study of the photographs does not support this assumption as a certain lack of maternalism was observable in these middle class mothers, who, in the quality of their tactile contacts, expressed passivity, lack of attention, and lack of affect. In most cases the reason for the higher time in contact was that the children contacted their mothers and the mothers allowed it. The middle class mothers seemed more interested in meeting friends at the beach than they were in relating to their children. This observer had the feeling that every good beach day a group of mothers would appear at the club, most often in the afternoon, carrying babies and baskets full of beach gear. Other students of the American scene have pointed out that middle class mothers are confined to their homes and apartments with their small children where they lack adult companionship during the day. Such women may well find that getting out of the house and meeting friends at the beach are the main reasons for going there. It was possible for them to relax from child-rearing chores at the beach because the club provided a safe and enclosed area and a life-guard to watch the babies and toddlers. So the apparent disinterest in their children is understandable; the beach may have been an "off-duty" sit- 206 THE FAMILY COORDINATOR July 1968

5 uation. We have, of course, no way of knowing the quality of the tactile contact they gave their small children at home. For middle class children whose mothers are often busy with housework and shopping, the availability of the mother's person at the beach, plus her inattention, may have been contributing factors to their relatively high tactile contacting scores. If the quality of the maternal handling is compared, it can be said that the working class mothers used anxious handling, the middle class mothers' handling was inattentive and the upper class mothers' handling was a kind of maternal care that paid attention. Many upper class mothers can afford servants and baby sitters so they have the option of bringing their children to the beach or leaving them at home. In the field study sample there was an actual lack of upper class infants and just-walking children, the ages which require the most mothering. The upper class mothers who were observed with their older children appeared to relate to them clearly and directly as a whole. This pattern of short, intensive contact could be the norm for upper class and professional women who see their children only at special times. A further reason why the upper class mother seems to pay closer attention to her child might be that the time that they spend together is an opportunity for her to teach the child the upper class way of life. This observer remembers one upper class mother who went to her daughter in the wading pool and asked her politely and in a low voice please not to make so much noise. Patterning of tactile activities. The mothers in the field study were tactually most active in the areas of Control and Caretaking with mean frequencies per child per hour of 6.6 and 4.5 touches, respectively. Far below these figures came the categories of Play, 1.6 contacts per child per hour; Affection, 1.2; Comfort, 0.8; and Anger, The high Control and Caretaking scores might be expected in a study of young children at the beach, but the low scores for Play and Affection are surprising in a recreational setting where mothers have the opportunities for these pleasant interactions with their young children. One of the main values in this culture is what Horney has called "the pleasure principle in American life." Having a good time is an important part of life. From these observations it seems that having a good time at the beach does not include, for mothers of young children, enjoying them in a direct, interpersonal, affective, tactile, and sensual sense. The results support the Fischers' findings in Orchard Town that mothers of preschool children are most frequently involved with them in activities connected with controlling their behavior. In the project itself, an analysis was done of the tactile activities within each category. Some of the highlights follow. The areas are discussed in order of frequency. Control. The working class mothers were the most controlling and manipulative with their children. Caretaking. The most active areas were feeding, dressing and undressing, and cleaning. It is interesting to note that out of 45 children, only one was naked, a girl; and only one little girl out of 25 wore a topless bathing suit. On the whole, the working and upper class mothers seemed to be more relaxed and acceptant of nudity and of the processes of elimination than the middle class mothers. The working class mothers were more concerned with cleanliness: only they classified sand as "dirt" and cleaned it off. They were also more careful about what their babies picked up or put into their mouths. The middle class mothers were most anxious about property infractions; they were also more strict about the expression of aggression. Comfort. In general, the children needed very little comforting; comforting contacts declined regularly with age. The mothers were generally acceptant and indulgent toward their children's dependency needs. Interesting differences in comforting methods appeared. The upper and working class mothers comforted with tactile contacts, while middle class mothers offered distractions, mostly food. Some children seemed to have learned not to ask for comfort; they July 1968 THE FAMILY COORDINATOR 207

6 took care of themselves through thumbsucking or through "attaching" to a so-called transitional object like a beach towel or soft toy. It was interesting to see how a brief pat on the head would reassure a toddler. These pats must have been surrogates for previously successful comforting contacts of longer duration. Play. In America small children are expected to play alone, away from the mother. Children of all classes are given a great variety of toys to play with. In these observations the mothers and children played with each other only rarely; the overall mean for tactile play contacts was only one and a half per child per hour. The youngest children were played with the least, the justwalkers the most, and as the children grew older the number of physical play contacts declined. Most frequently it was the mother who initiated playing with the younger children; with the older children, play was often initiated by the child himself. For the child who is considered to be too old for cuddling, play may be a way to obtain physical contact with the mother. This kind of tactile play was most often initiated by boys. Affection. Spurgeon English has said that love and touch are inseparable. Few spontaneous gestures of tactile affection were seen at the beach. The average number per child per hour was less than one and a half. The upper class showed the most frequent tactile affection, 1.5 contacts; the working class, 1.3; the middle class, 0.8. The justwalking children received the most tactile affection. Mothers may experience a resurgence of affection for these toddlers who already are beginning to move away from them. It is interesting to see that, whereas the working class mothers with the youngest children touched them affectionately the least, the upper class mothers with the oldest children touched them with love the most. Some mothers smile love at their children; of the four smilers who were nontouchers, three were middle class. Grandmothers may give more tactile affection than mothers. One grandmother was sitting next to her grandchild who was strapped into a plastic baby carrier. She told me she wanted to hold him, he wanted it, but his mother had said he had to learn to be by himself. Anger. Only four cases of direct physical expression of anger were seen at the beach. Three of the angry mothers were working class, one was middle class. The working class mothers spanked or shoved their children because of misbehaviors like running out on the dock; the middle class mother spanked her child because she had expressed aggression and broken the rules of property by taking another child's shovel. Touch and speech. The relationship between the communication modalities of touch and speech is one of our main interests. As the child grows older, the parent shifts from the tactile modality to the verbal one. The choices that mothers make about which communication channel to use, or to use them both simultaneously-messages may be either similar or contradictory as in the case of the mother who pulled her screaming daughter into the lake, meanwhile repeating, "Don't be scared, P."- these choices seem to be unconscious ones that are largely culturally determined. On the beach the working class used words harshly, often shouting directions and admonitions at their small children (which the children generally ignored) ; the middle class used words sparingly; and the upper class used words most often in a kind of affectionate play. And more than the other mothers, they combined touch and words when communicating with their children. Scott (1963) has pointed out that if the parent withdraws the touch form of communication before the child's verbal facility is established, the parent is actually leaving the child speechless in two modalities. Hayakawa (1967) also emphasizes the concept of verbal speech as a new language for the child. He calls children "recent immigrants" to our verbal culture. The Child-to-Mother Afectional System Harlow (1960) described four phases in the child-to-mother affectional system. Because the reflex stage lasts only a few months, the beach study is mainly concerned with the stages of affectionate attach- 208 THE FAMILY COORDINATOR July 1968

7 ment and security and the beginning of the stage of independence. The phase of affectionate attachment begins when the infant is between two and three months old, and it develops gradually in the first year of life. By smiling, cuddling, or other ways, the baby begins to show active and voluntary affection for his mother. The security stage begins shortly after the attachment phase-probably when the infant is able to experience visually induced fear reactions. The so-called six or eight months' anxiety usually marks the beginning of this phase. In the security stage the troubled child goes to the mother and "attaches." Tactile contact and age. Child-initiated tactile contact with the mother declined with age. The non-walking toddlers seemed to express the greatest need for tactile contact with their mothers. A close look at the individual protocols shows that the contacting behavior of a child that was either far below or far above the norm for his age was an indication of an emotional imbalance in the mother-child relationship. It seemed that the child who had not experienced satisfactory tactile contact did not approach his mother for it. Examples were the two crawling children who stayed nearby but apart from their mothers at a time when affectionate attachment is usually at its height. Children who were over-anxious tended to have very high tactile contacting needs which they expressed physically by using the mother's body as a source of security. One of these children had experienced maternal privation, and two were reacting to marital difficulties and family break-up. Like the anxious monkeys in Harlow's experiments, all three children clung to their mothers and were unable, except for relatively short sallies, to go out, explore and play in the environment. Two little boys were among the oldest in the study-37 months and 40 months-so their behavior was very regressive. Duration of contact and social class. The working class child's tactile contacting behaviors were low in comparison with those of the other children. This might be due to the quality and kind of feedback these chil- dren had received in response to previous tactile demands. Duration of contact and sex. In the child-mother system, the differences between the girls and boys were very slight but they were consistently in favor of the boys. There seemed to be no difference in the way little boys or girls used the mother as a source of security, or in the way the mothers reacted to these demands. The cultural stereotype which says that girls can be weak but boys must not be sissies was probably implicit in the mothers' behaviors, but it was not obvious in these observations. The pattern of play. In the field of study, the working class children spent the least time in physical contact with their mothers and the most time playing near them. The middle class children spent the most time in contact and the most time playing away. The upper class children made the greatest number of contacting acts and spent more time playing near their mothers and less time playing away from them. This unsuspected pattern of behavior of the older, upper class children can perhaps be explained by the upper class way of life mentioned before. This time at the beach or pool might have been an opportunity for them to be with their mothers, to play with them, and to come to them frequently for shared attention and contact. The adequate, emotionally related feedback they received would tend to encourage them in this behavior. Play with the mother was found to vary very much by social class. The upper class children played with their mothers nearly twice as much as the middle class children, who played with their mothers twice as much as the working class children. Affection, resistance, and anger. In this study the middle class children expressed more tactile affection than the other children. Girls were no more affectionate than boys. The small child must separate himself from his mother. The second year is the time when the child's resistance to the mother reaches its height. These acts of resistance are some of the negative feedbacks July 1968 THE FAMILY COORDINATOR 209

8 that cue the development of the stage of maternal ambivalence in the mother. Maternal handling that is sensitive to the individual child's needs and rhythms creates less resistance than maternal handling that is not. More than twice as many working class children resisted their mothers as middle class children. The number of upper class children who resisted was half of that. Only two cases of anger were seen at the beach. Each angry child demanded attention from a significant adult and was rebuffed. The working class child expressed his anger directly by pulling his big sister's hair. The middle class child ran away from her mother and stole a shovel from a little friend. She was immediately punished by her mother. Conclusions The main finding in this study of tactile communication is that no stage of close body contact between mothers and babies was evident, even in the phase of maternal attachment. The mothers did meet their children's essential physical and psychological needs for need, comfort and safety. The mothers in the study were tactually most active in the later phases of maternal protection and security when they continued their caretaking activities, controlled their mobile children and let themselves be used as a haven of safety and reassurance. (Editor's Note: This study raises some interesting questions. To what extent is "touch" seen as a valid channel of communication? What differences might have been observed with a sharper definition of class distinctions? Would other observers read different meanings into the hour-long interactions or into the photographs? Hopefully readers will pursue the topic further in education, research, and counseling settings.) REFERENCES: Cherry, Colin. On Human Communication. New Work: Science Editions, Inc., Harlow, Harry F. Primary Affectional Patterns in Primates. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1960, 30, Harlow, Harry F. and Margaret K. Harlow. A Study of Animal Affection. Natural History, 1961, 70, Hayakawa, S. I. Communicating with One's Children. Psychology Today, 1961,1, 48-53; Scott, J. P. The Process of Primary Socialization in Canine and Human Infants. Monographs of The Society for Research in Child Development. 28, Yellow Springs, Ohio: The Antioch Press, Address Changes, Subscription Renewals Correspondence relative to address changes and subscription renewals for THE FAMILY COORDINATOR should be sent directly to: The National Council on Family Relations, 1219 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, Minnesota "I make a practice of recommending SEXOLOGY to all my classes." Warren R. Johnson Professor of Health Education University of Maryland "I strongly encourage those who teach in this area (marriage and family) to experiment with using SEXOL- OGY as a supplementary text in teaching basic courses." William D. Brown Chairman, Child Dev. and Fam. Relations, Colorado State U. Sexology Magazine J Park Ave. S., N.Y., N.Y., Please enter a yearly subscription-special rate $2.50. (The regular rate is $5.00.) C1 Please send a free sample of your publication. C1 Please send a free copy of your Sex Knowledge Test. I 3 N am e I Address City -State - Zip Code THE FAMILY COORDINATOR July 1968