Tactile hunger in a child- this is a lack of touches, hugs, kisses. No matter how frivolous it may sound, it is this factor that largely determines the character of a person in the future. From a child with tactile hunger, with almost a 100% guarantee, an adult capable of aggression will grow up - angry and difficult to correct.

Tactile hunger in a child: who is at risk

It would seem that a small child and tactile hunger are incompatible things. At first, he is almost always carried in his arms, often dressed and applied to his chest, then constantly squeezed and kissed. And yet, sometimes kids don't get enough. At risk are often children from socially disadvantaged families, as well as those who receive artificial instead.

In addition, all children have an individual need for the frequency of tactile contact. Those who need it more than others are called kinesthetics.

The kinesthetic learner focuses on receiving information through touch. Initially, all kinesthetic babies are poorly developed until a certain point, but in the process of development, the most important channel for him stands out. Some become visual, some become auditory, and some remain kinesthetic.

• The child is mobile and active - it is difficult for him to sit still, he must always act: jump, run, jerk, etc. It is possible to persuade him to rest only in fits and starts.
• Any object that falls into the field of vision is immediately taken by the child into his hands and / or sent to his mouth - everything needs to be tried on the tooth. Note that if , then this is normal.
• Acquaintance with a new toy goes like this: they shake it, beat it, squeeze it, while the baby may not even look at it - he listens to the sensations.
• Having matured a little, the child begins to imitate adults - he tries to do “adult work”, picks up tools, joyfully presses the buttons on the washing machine, etc.

If you find these signs in your child, most likely your baby is kinesthetic.

How to deal with tactile hunger in a child

Of course, raising children comes with some challenges, and a child with tactile hunger is said to be the most "difficult". To prevent or manage tactile hunger, follow these guidelines.

• As long as weight allows, carry your baby in your arms or in a sling. Later, take the baby by the hand, do not demand from him excessive independence.
• The baby can be put to sleep in the parent's bed or lulled in her arms. Later, be sure to kiss the child at night - make a ritual out of it.
• Any information or request should be supplemented with bodily sensations: stroke the child on the shoulder, take the hand or pat on the head - this way he will understand you better.

It is known that a child who does not experience tactile hunger grows more calm and balanced. He is confident in his abilities and easily learns new information - thus the fate of a person is formed in early childhood.

Touching the skin carries more emotional information than speech. Therefore, conversation or written communication can never fully convey the feeling of love, as it is available to us through touch.

Can I hug you?

We tend to associate hunger with the stomach, but it turns out our skin can get hungry too. There is even a term in psychology "hunger for touch"(English skin hunger, touch hunger).

I have a version that we are trying to satisfy this hunger (unconsciously and unsuccessfully) by overeating and other addictions, leaning on alcohol or, say, unnecessary shopping.

Here are some of the most important facts about the lack of touch and tips on how to make up for it.

1. The surface of our skin is covered with many nerve endings. Until recently, it was believed that they all perform the same, informational function - we touch, feel objects in order to understand, to collect impressions. These nerve endings respond to temperature, pressure, pain, itching, and other sensations. They help the brain determine the position of the body in space and quickly navigate when faced with something unfamiliar.

2. But there is another, small variety of nerve fibers on the skin - they read only slow and gentle touches, strokes (1-10 cm per second), and in response, pleasant sensations arise in the brain, similar to the euphoria of a runner - they are produced " happiness hormones" endorphins, serotonin and oxytocin.

3. This newly discovered type of fiber transmits a signal to the brain 5-10 times slower than the first, informational. Therefore, for example, we do not immediately feel the sharpness of chili pepper on the tongue - the substance capsaicin in its composition acts just on the slow nerve endings.

4. Scientists have noticed that signals from fast information fibers are processed in the sensory part of the brain, and from slow ones - in the department responsible for recognizing emotions. That is, their function is not just to inform, but also to evoke feelings.

In fact, touching the skin carries more emotional information than speech. Therefore, conversation or written communication can never fully convey the feeling of love, as it is available to us through touch.

5. The main purpose of the second type of nerve fibers is to cause pleasure, thus encouraging our social connections and reinforcing the feeling of attachment.

"Hunger for touch" means a lack of physical contact with others - friendly, caring, slow and careful touches that cause a pleasant feeling of relaxation, warmth, security, a feeling that we are accepted and loved, that we are welcome.

6. A person who lacks physical contact with others(it's not about sex, it's completely different) plunges into a state akin to depression: speaks in a flat, devoid of intonation voice, he has an extinct or exhausted look, increased anxiety or, conversely, aggressiveness. Stressful situations devastate him and it is not possible to replenish his strength to the end.

7. Unfortunately, we communicate more and more on social networks and less and less in real life.. The circle of our virtual friends and acquaintances is growing, but with it - a feeling of loneliness, a lack of physical contact with like-minded people.

Lucky are those countries and cultures in which it is customary to touch each other. For example, experiments have shown that the French, both adults and children, touch each other more often in friendly communication than Americans, so the level of aggressiveness in French society is noticeably lower.

8. Children and the elderly suffer the most from touch deficiency.- friendly, caring, gentle touches and hugs are what they need first of all. It has been proven that a child grows up more stress-resistant and self-confident if from an early age he was hugged and carefully stroked. Elderly people, who are gently touched, get sick less, they have stronger immunity.

9. On the palms, soles of the feet and lips, slow nerve fibers do not occur, therefore, for example, stroking our own hand, we feel a pleasant contact at the place of touch, but not in the palm.

Have you ever wondered why so many of us are so drawn to run a cloth across our cheeks to feel its smoothness? There are slow nerve fibers on the cheek, but not on the palms. Therefore, pure information comes from the hands, and information + emotion comes from the cheek. ‎

An important question is how to fill the deficit of touches, if there are not enough of them? Most often, massage is advised in such cases, but not all of us, for various reasons, have the opportunity and desire to regularly go to massage sessions.

Here are some tips that work for me:

hug family and friends more often, turn it into a habit. For example, hugging friends at a meeting and at parting. Doctors advise at least 6 hugs a day (by the way, they even help to lose weight!), And children and the elderly need to be hugged even more often.

At the same time, it is important not to violate personal boundaries - if a child or an adult is unpleasant to touch (this can be seen in the face, body position), you need to respect his or her feelings and not be offended. If I suddenly want to hug someone, I always ask permission first: “May I?”.

Stunning in terms of the power of emotions, a social experiment turned out to be a resident of Sydney- at some point he was left alone and felt acute loneliness - he could not overcome it. He recalls that everything changed when a girl at a party after they met gave him a friendly hug. He decided to go outside with a poster: "I give hugs."

Passers-by began to approach and hug him, then each other, then the experiment spread to other cities and countries. The video currently has over 77 million views. The main thing that the author of this experiment understood was that so many of us are sorely lacking in friendly touches, and it’s really easy to give them to each other, even if you are not close friends.

shake hands. For me, this is an opportunity to learn a lot about a person, to determine my attitude towards him, without violating my personal space.

take care of your body and skin consciously. This means listening to your feelings, passing them through consciousness. For example: when we take a shower and feel how the drops touch the skin; apply cream, perfume; massage the stiff muscles of the neck or head, foaming the shampoo (by the way, according to scientific experiments, the most pleasant places for a slow, gentle massage are the scalp and back); we stroke ourselves on the head or on the cheek, repeating mother's or grandmother's, grandfather's gesture from childhood - just to calm down and cheer up.

It is worth reminding yourself more often that creams, sports and massage are not only about looking good, but, first of all, about feeling good. That is, our relationship with the body should not be purely functional, they should be consciously fed with positive emotions and memories. published

Tactile hunger is the absence or lack of tactile touch, the sensation of something. It is known that touch is very important for our development. For young children, the restriction or deprivation of touch, tactile hunger is fraught with a delay in mental development. Touch is a child's way of understanding the world. The touch of other people is also very important to us. A small child, deprived of maternal affection, hugs, is either aggressive or will be depressed, lethargic. After all, children need to love and be loved one of the most important.

Touch is very informative. Lightly touching another person, we instantly determine our attitude towards him at the level of acceptance or rejection. And very often this first intuition turns out to be correct. As we get older, we increasingly lose the opportunity to touch others in everyday life. It is considered indecent to violate the personal boundaries of other people. We protect our own comfort zone. The comfort zone is more than an arm's length, something like a meter. So we walk in such protected cocoons of inaccessibility. And we are not comfortable if someone violates these boundaries. As a result, we are increasingly experiencing tactile hunger.

Group sports, martial arts, dancing, regular sex, etc. compensate for the lack of bodily communication. There are more accessible ways to touch and convey your attitude to others. These are hugs. Thanks, among other things, to popular psychological trainings, hugs are gradually entering the daily practice of communication. They are able to instantly improve mood, comfort, encourage. Those families that, according to our recommendations, have introduced "hugs" into family rituals, note a significant improvement in the psychological climate, an increase in the level of trust between family members.

It has long been noted that clients of body-oriented psychotherapists, masseurs, note a surge of strength, a good emotional mood, lightness in the body, often getting rid of pain in the body after sessions with a specialist. And these sensations do not really depend on the type of impact. Whether it is an active massage, a deep study of muscles and ligaments, or light stroking, palsing (swaying), vibrations, light touches in different parts of the body. Such a session is preferably carried out for at least 30 minutes. And this is another of the affordable and very effective ways to "quench" your tactile hunger, improve your well-being, solve many problems of relationships with the outside world and yourself.

The psychotherapeutic effect occurs when, during a therapeutic conversation, the client, together with a body-oriented psychotherapist, forms a ritual that connects the client’s sensations, feelings and emotions about the stated problem, the “bodily image” (metaphor) of this problem and the resulting changes as a result of bodily influence. Tactile sensations in this case play the role of awareness of changes in the bodily image. If in the process of interaction the client feels liberation from blocks and clamps holding back vital energy, then in the subconscious this is associated with a complete or partial resolution of his problem.

The story of Juan Mann, the founder of the Free Hugs movement, has spread all over the world. Having turned out to be a "tourist in his hometown" by the will of circumstances, he made a sign out of a piece of cardboard, where it was written with a marker: "Free Embrace." Among the indifferent crowd of Sydney, it was not immediately found a person who responded to the call of a lonely soul. She was a woman who lost her only daughter exactly a year ago, but her morning was darkened by the fact that her beloved dog suddenly died. The only thing she needed was a hug.

Unfortunately, in our age, the age of individualism, we are increasingly passing by someone else's misfortune. In the turmoil of days, thoughts about work, it is difficult for us to find time to encourage our loved ones. But they need so little ... Think about it: just a touch! What is his magical power?

To answer this question, you need to understand the nature of the sense of touch. Surprisingly, when we touch an object, we do not feel it, but our own skin. To believe this, you can do an interesting and at the same time very simple experiment. You need to be in an unfamiliar room and turn off the light. It is very important that the objects that you come across are alien, otherwise you will have a visual image and you will understand that this is, for example, your chair. It is when there is no way to recognize or remember that the sense of touch works. So, you perceive "something", you stumbled upon "something", but at the same time this "something" stumbled upon you. This is the peculiarity of the sense of touch: a part of you becomes awakened by a part of the world. The boundary collides with the boundary, and you slowly but inevitably become aware of your own limitations, your own physicality. It becomes clear why a small child always pulls his hands to objects in order to touch them: this is not just a desire to know the world, this is a desire to feel himself.

But the sense of touch is used not only objectively (in order to find out whether something is actually present), but subjectively (in order to express closeness, intimacy). Thanks to consciousness, a person is able to distinguish between these two ways. If this did not happen, then the examination by a doctor would be very doubtful.

In the case when we touch a loved one, the subjective way works. Embracing, caressing, we do not even think about the fact that at this moment we are extremely selfish. In “Thoughts on the Problems of Love” (a chapter from the book “Erotica”), the philosopher wrote: “If we look into the world of the simplest creatures, we will find that small amoebas copulate and multiply, and in pairs they press one into the other, absolutely merging with the other being. It seems natural to us that people in the physical realm are no longer capable of such a complete fusion; our body is satisfied that only a part of itself must “go” for fertilization, only it must take part in this complete fusion and only in a narrowly limited function.

In a strange way, but as far as the soul, and not the body, is concerned, we want this interpenetration to spread even further, just as it happens in amoebas. With our soul we want the same thing as with the body: not dissolution in another person, but, on the contrary, thanks to our contact, fruitful formation, strengthening, doubling, up to fruitful growth.

The impossible on the physical level seems possible on the spiritual level. Rudolf Steiner said on this occasion that without the sense of touch man would never have developed the realization of the divine. And what is God? Love. Therefore, another person, to whom we are drawn, into whom we are trying to penetrate spiritually, is a microcosm, and unity with him, as it seems to us, will deprive us of the eternal longing contained in the sense of touch. It is a longing for wholeness, it is the deepest mystery of the cosmos. Our entire evolution is permeated with separation from the whole, but a person still has the feeling that he is connected with this whole. “Touch is separation and connection at the same time,” he believed. Novalis.

"Hungry" cannot be happy.
Just as the human body has a hunger for food and vitamins, our psyche "starves" for sensations and experiences, and its activity is disturbed if they are not enough. Let's consider some of them.

1. Sensory hunger (need for sensations). A person is very difficult to tolerate monotony and constantly needs new visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory sensations. Many people experience a lack of touch. Especially from the lack of tactile sensations suffer "kinesthetics" - those people who perceive the world mainly through bodily sensations, and not through the visual and auditory systems. They find it hardest to endure "tactile hunger".

What to do? Whenever there is an opportunity to change the route from home to work, do it. Going to the theater, to an exhibition, a simple walk in the park, sports (in any form). Traveling is a great opportunity to satisfy sensory hunger by encountering unfamiliar smells, tastes, and touches. And, of course, hugs! There is a theory that it is vital for a person to hug someone (husband, children, girlfriend, in extreme cases, a cat or dog) at least seven times a day. Don't deny yourself this simple pleasure!

2. Hunger for communication, contacts with other people. We want to see and hear other people, to be among people. It occurs in two cases: when we lack communication as such (for example, on maternity leave), or when our circle of acquaintances cannot satisfy our need for communication (uninteresting topics, superficial, shallow or formal communication).

What to do? Think about whether there is a company where you are always welcome. It can be parents, classmates, colleagues from the first job, your like-minded people. That is, people with whom you can be open and frank. Hunger for achievement. We cannot help but develop. Everyone has their own sphere: intellectual, spiritual, creative, everyone finds his own occupation. Moreover, we usually want to achieve achievements first of all at work, and secondly - in hobbies. Hunger arises when, due to some circumstances, we cannot realize ourselves.

What to do? Allow yourself to strive for something new and interesting - a second higher education, a new hobby, new knowledge, books. It's never too late to learn new things. Remember what you once dreamed about. Even if it's a childhood dream to be a ballerina. Yes, you will not become the second Ulanova, but the pleasure will be guaranteed. And do not forget what you have already achieved, do not devalue what you already have.

3. Hunger for recognition. The human being is arranged in such a way that it cannot confine itself to the material side of achievement. We still need praise, approval, positive evaluation from other people. In general, you always want someone, as in childhood, to “pat your head”, say how smart, kind, handsome, etc. you are. We need public recognition of our qualities, merits and just attention to our person. That is why we lay out the napkins we have knitted in the most visible place, hang out the embroidered pictures and listen with pleasure to the reviews.

What to do? It would seem that everything is clear here - go to those who praise you. But there is one caveat: no matter how many people say that you are “the best”, until you yourself recognize your value and significance, you will not be able to accept recognition from others. Therefore, love yourself. Not the one you will become when you graduate from the institute (three institutes and a university), get married (and they lived happily and never quarreled, because they died on the same day), become a star, a ballerina, a mother (an ideal mother with ideal children). And the one that is sometimes gloomy in the morning, which still fails to bake the “same” blueberry pie, and the children are not always obedient. The one who you are, with all the flaws and virtues, abilities, talents in one and the complete absence of them in something else. The one that can be happy and sad, tender and categorical, that knows how to be sad, yearn, rejoice, dance, get angry and love. Just let yourself live without comparing yourself to anyone.

Let chocolate be just chocolate.

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