Essay:The Necessity for Touch and Intimacy for Minors

By Adi Lupus.

Intro

As I was preparing myself to write this article, I heard outside my window, a woman saying to her child, a 3-year-old, 4 at most: "I can't hold you and smoke a cigarette at the same time" and the kid was crying to be held. Imagine calling yourself a parent but then making a cigarette more important to hold than your own child.

Sadly, today we live in this vast global society that has become disconnected, mostly sexless and sex-shaming and void of touch, simply starved for physical affection, so much so that an outbreak of just simple hugging by high school students prompts media outrage and misplaced discussion of abuse when many other cultures would find it either unremarkable or worth celebrating.

The Pandemic (of isolation and lack of touch)

With the pandemic looming over all of our heads, alongside the lengthy lockdowns, we have seen society dive deeper into the depths of depression, loneliness, and even suicide simply because people who were socially hyperactive (which is a super positive trait) were all of a sudden faced with extreme isolationist and no-contact restrictions and policies which made them feel deprived of the joy of socializing with other human beings and on the other end of the spectrum, people that were already lonely and depressed, their condition got even worse as they too have been deprived of even that little contact that they may have had with other people, leaving them completely stranded away from any connection that some, literally kept alive and willing to live. So, all people got impacted in one way or another by the simple deprivation of the sense of touch, either through a hug, a kiss, or just a regular handshake and any other form of socializing since all those things were prohibited by the WHO or at least strongly advised against and unfortunately, out of fear, many followed that advice. Those that live alone were hurt the most as lockdowns forced them to stay alone inside their homes and avoid any social interaction.

But, what does this have to do with the well-being of minors? Well...

Lack of physical affection can actually kill babies

It has been shown that touch eases pain, lifts depression and it may even contribute to a team to win at a match. The more serious meaning of touch, what makes it a vital necessity, is that the lack of providing it to babies i.e. not holding them, not nuzzling them, and not hugging them enough, can make them stop growing and if that lack of touch persists long enough, they will most likely die.

This, rather obvious logical conclusion to those that truly understand the power of the irrational feelings such as love or intimate connection, has also been concluded by researchers that primarily posed this question: “Why do some orphanages have infant mortality rates around 30-40%?” The sheer mortality rate of infants in those orphanages is somewhat genocidal towards the future youth and so, because of this, the question was asked and the results of the study gave the following answer: orphanages are not suitable places for infants. Babies aged zero to five simply do not receive enough stimulation in group residential care to develop to their full capacity. What those orphanages critically lack here is individualized physical parental attention. For one, this nurturing is necessary for the brain to learn to connect human contact with pleasure. This association is one of the foundations of empathy, we connect first through soothing touch and shared smiles.

The sad part for babies that make it through such orphanages is that they grow to become fearful and avoiding of touch altogether, and this again, is due to their lack of touch in their upbringing, lack of having intensive and repeated loving contact with at least the same one or two people, thus being hindered in their ability to make the proper connections with people or to build any type of bonding, physical or emotional later on in life. One positive outlook is that children that are placed in loving homes have the chance of reversing the damage that was done, although, even in those instances, some children will never be able to fully repair and overcome that. This only goes to show how truly destructive and detrimental can the lack of touch be to many children which sounds the alarm for more friendly touch and physical contact like fondling, cuddling, caressing and kisses being necessary for the emotional and mental development of babies, children and minors in general so that they may grow into loving and caring healthy adults. The actually, truly, disgusting practice is that a lot of nursery schools, preschools, and even high schools sometimes outright ban physical contact in a misguided and truly self-righteous delusional attempt to avoid sexual abuse that even isn’t there in the first place to begin with. A typical Don Quixote-esque case of utter delusion in action to fight non-existing injustices and/or “immoralities”. Those practices are wholly ineffective and counterproductive and are only to the detriment of minors. This is because if kids don't get healthy and proper loving touch and care, they are more vulnerable to actual psychopathic predators who can actually harm them and irreversibly so. On another note, some cross-cultural research suggests that cultures which lavish more affection on infants and children are less violent and less prone to crime and thus predatory behavior.

So, the takeaway from this segment is, if you want empathetic children, and an empathetic culture, touch and be touched.

The tragic Frederick experiment

Excerpts from a .PDF File on the experiment.

Back in the thirteenth century, the German king, Frederick II, conducted a diabolical experiment intended to discover what language children would naturally grow up to speak if never spoken to. [...] King Frederick took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were forbidden to speak in their hearing. But a second rule was imposed, as well: the nurses were not allowed to touch the infants. To his great dismay, Frederick’s experiment was cut short, but not before something tragically significant regarding human nature was revealed. The babies grew up to speak no language at all because they died. The power of touch is laid bare in this horrific experiment. In the year 1248, an Italian historian named Salimbene di Adam recorded, with an air of scientific observation, “They could not live without petting.” The babies literally died for want of touch. [...] Modern medicine calls this phenomenon, “failure to thrive.” “For some reason, we humans flourish under the influence of love and we gradually die without it”. [...] Ornish presents study after study demonstrating that love is a chief influence for mental, emotional, and even physical health. On page 29 he summarizes the unexpected message of the rapidly accumulating body of data:

Anything that promotes feelings of love and intimacy is healing; anything that promotes isolation, separation, loneliness, loss, hostility, anger, cynicism, depression, alienation, and related feelings often leads to suffering, disease, and premature death from all causes.

(Dean Ornish, Love and Survival, p.29)

Modern science is now proving through controlled studies that human beings are literally engineered for love. We are made for love, as if our DNA contains the message, “You must love and be loved in order to survive.”

[...]

The problem for many scientists is that they are trying to understand the human need for love within a paradigm of reality that does not allow for the existence of love! Because Darwinian evolution begins with a survival-of-the-fittest premise, it dictates that self-preservation must be the highest law and the main factor in our survival. Love, by contrast, is essentially self-giving rather than self-preserving, and, therefore, makes no sense in the evolutionary context. [Adi Lupus: Here, I would like to add a personal opinion that in fact, love, in most cases, is still intrinsically self-preserving in the unintuitive way that by giving oneself to someone else, while it is giving rather than preserving, in the long run, if the relationship is successful because of that giving of oneself to another, it will lead to procreation and thus self-preservation through the continuation of the bloodline.]

If materialistic evolution is the truth of human origins, then human beings are merely biological animals and there is no such thing as love. And yet, here we are, creatures who thrive on love and are utterly dependent on it. A tenacious desire to love and be loved pervades every human heart. We try to explain it with no reference point beyond ourselves, and we seek its satisfaction in countless material pursuits, but it remains, larger than anything this world can offer, more persistent than our most determined resistance, and insistently fixed on something MORE than ourselves.

Love instead of solely exercise?

Even though there is this popular belief that the best ways to reduce stress are things like exercise, meditation, and relaxation, which are good ways to do that, they aren’t really “The Best” ways to do it. In fact, the most important source of stress reduction are the relationships that we build with people. A study shows that strong relationships have a 50% lower risk of mortality than those who are isolated and without social support. We need to learn to handle stress from our parents as they nurture and interact with us through physical affection as infants and thus our mind is wired such that our "Mommy" or "Daddy" are the first people that need to reliably relieve us of our stress. Whenever you see a baby light up when a parent returns home from work or when they come to the kindergarten to pick them up, you see a part of this process in action. Since the link between human contact and stress relief is so primal, it comes as a no-brainer that supportive friends and family have so many health benefits.

As we grow up, we learn to connect other social contacts with stress relief, generalizing from our early experience and learning to take pleasure in being in touch. But when children are exposed to extreme stress early in life (especially without these modulating forces) there is a dramatically increased risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and every mental illness that has been studied, including addictions. These studies emphasize that these effects last a lifetime and that in many cases, friends and family truly are the best medicine.

Takeaway, if you want to be happy and healthy, learning to empathize and connect is critical.

Of intimacy and sex during the development of minors

From NewgonWiki's article on Sexual Repression:

Child sexual repression refers to the prevention, through either subtle or overt methods, of children from fulfilling their erotic capacities.

[...]

Prescott, J.W. (1975). "Body Pleasure and The Origins of Violence," in The Futurist and The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists.

Prescott links deprivation of physical affection in childhood to the eventual development of violent and aggressive behaviors. He examines various cultures, and finds that high levels of violence are strongly correlated with repression of extramarital sexual activity.

Sagan, C. (1980). "Who Speaks For Earth".

"Mammals characteristically nuzzle, fondle, hug, caress, pet, groom and love their young, behavior essentially unknown among the reptiles. If it is really true that the R-complex and limbic systems live in an uneasy truce within our skulls and still partake of their ancient predelictions, we might expect affectionate parental indulgence to encourage our mammalian natures, and the absence of physical affection to prod reptilian behavior. There is some evidence that this is the case. In laboratory experiments, Harry and Margaret Harlow found that monkeys raised in cages and physically isolated— even though they could see, hear and smell their simian fellows—developed a range of morose, withdrawn, self-destructive and otherwise abnormal characteristics. In humans the same is observed for children raised without physical affection—usually in institutions —where they are clearly in great pain."

[...]

Nelson, J. A. (1989). "Intergenerational sexual contact: A continuum model of participants and experiences," Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, 15, 3-12.

"Many patients who present with sex problems suffer not because they were exposed to early sexual experience but because they were deprived of the natural sexual imprinting that occurs among animals and primitive humans (Harlow & Harlow, 1962)"

[...]

Rule, Jane. (1979). Teaching sexuality," The Body Politic, June.

[...]

"For every child traumatized by overt and brutal sexual treatment, there are many, many more suffering the damage of ignorance and repression which makes masochistic women and sadistic men the norms of our society. [...] Children are sexual, and it is up to us to take responsibility for their real education. They have been exploited and betrayed long enough by our silence."

Conclusion

We are wired for touch. Touch is an essential human need that is as basic as the need for food, water, and shelter. The power of touch is so strong that the lack of physical affection can even kill babies. In a society that is starved for physical affection, we need to recognize the importance of touch and intimacy, especially for minors.

Sources used

1. Touching Empathy: Lack of physical affection can actually kill babies (Psychology Today)
2. Friends (and Family) Are the Best Medicine: We learn to handle stress from our parents during infancy (Psychology Today)
3. For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?’ (New York Times)
4. Without touch, we die. The Fredericks experiment (Linkedin/Pulse)
5. Fredericks Experiment PDF (Digma.com)
6. Research: Sexual repression (NewgonWiki Anthology)