Affectionate touch and care: embodied intimacy compassion and control in early childhood education

Relational care, interpersonal intimacy and emotional attunement are crucial for children’s development and well-being in ECEC. This study has looked at how these traits are enacted in Swedish kindergartens through recurrent physical contact between adults and children. The aim of the study was to investigate practices related to affectionate touch and affectionate-controlling touch, and to document (1) when and how these touches are used, and (2) how the children and educators respond to these touches.

The study was able to show that the educators’ affectionate touch was used for emotional regulation in response to the children’s needs, and that amicable touch engaged the children in acts of haptic affection and closeness.  In addition, affectionate-controlling touch was used to lightly control and guide the children’s embodied conduct in the kindergarten activities, or to mitigate the educators’ verbal disciplining. The study demonstrates the emotional complexity of kindergarten educators’ practices related to socialisation through touch. The study supports the policy makers’ claim that embodied relational care and intimacy are and should be integrated into educational settings, contrary to ideas that connect professionalism with emotional distance, lack of physical contact, and the predominance of didactic encounters.

The data consisted of 24 hours of video recordings of everyday activities in kindergarten, with nine educators and 35 children (1-5 years old). The kindergarten was chosen as a result of a formal request to the municipality about the educators’ interest in participating in the study. The study adopted a multimodal interactive approach that inductively investigated how embodied social actions are accomplished in social encounters between children and adults.

Cekaite, A. & Bergnehr, D. (2018). «Affectionate touch and care: embodied intimacy compassion and control in early childhood education». European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 26(6):940-955.