Please don’t touch! But is this really the case with children? In reality, even the seemingly more timid ones seek and wish to be touched. Touching for them means experimenting, researching, feeling. Many children look for a sense of security by holding an object in their hands that can relax them, and make them feel at ease. Simply touching that object re-establishes their relationship with the environment. Touching makes them remember. By touching, they experience that thing. By tapping, they search. This is why they touch everything: toys, objects placed in their environment, biscuits, and even the food on plates. Before tasting it, they touch. Everything serves to develop touch, and for many children this is the primary way to communicate. In fact, it allows for empathy between educator and child. After the observation, the relationship must dare the risk of touch: ruffle the hair, a high five, a caress. What happens is that when the educator decides to create contact with his or her hands, it is the child who anticipates the gesture.
This is the case for some children with Smith-Magenis syndrome: their hyperactivity is full of affection, learning disabilities are compensated for by their ability to relate. Despite the limited movements of the hands and arms, they want to be embraced. They approach the educator by moving the body with skeletal anomalies: they seek contact, perhaps only to help them fall asleep (they suffer from disturbed sleep) or to remedy, with a clever sympathy, some cognitive and “tactile” deficiencies, which more than being removed can be accompanied and smoothed out during the growth process.
Luigi Laguaragnella
