Essential Body Contact - Significant Facts and Experiences

Orang-utans carry their young for two years. If the mother is killed by poachers, the infant will not survive unless it is carried day and night by a human for eighteen months. This experiment was successfully carried out as part of a reintegration project in Asia and shows the importance of body contact between mother and infant and the feelings of security that this creates.
In many Western countries we are often still advised to leave an infant to sleep and cry alone in a crib or a barred infant bed. After World War Two it was noticed that the infant mortality rate among children of less than one year old was lower in poor families despite poor hygienic conditions. In contrast to children from wealthier families, the poorest had more body contact with their mother.

The anthropologist Jean Liedloff lived among the Ye’kuana, an Amazonian forest tribe, for two years. She was struck by the lack of conflict between adults and children. Their infants are carried until they are able to crawl. The adults consider the children to be totally separate social beings, worthy of the same respect as adults and possessing innate skills that need only to be released. Despite this, the child is not the centre of the universe and the parents do not spend their time watching their children, but rather they include them in their everyday life while the little one is perched high on the parent's body. In Western society we often make the error of interrupting our activities to try to understand what a child wants from us. The child then becomes stressed by this uncertainty and tests the adult’s solidity. An adult Ye’kuana does not recognise this type of tension. They go about their business allowing their children to calmly find their own way in life.

In Bali, which has escaped colonisation and therefore strong western influences, children do not normally touch the ground until the age of six months. They are carried exclusively by their mother for the first two years of life and then by other adults. The young Netsilik Inuit of Canada is placed skin-to-skin against his mother beneath a thick fur. If he starts to suck his mother’s skin, she understands that he wants the breast. This direct contact allows the mother to detect the slightest signal and to respond quickly to the needs of her baby, who cries only rarely.

A chief from the African Kikuyu tribe described his experience: “My first memories are all linked to my mother. I remember the soft touch of her body when she carried me on her back and the pleasant smell of her sun-warmed skin. When I was hungry or thirsty, she tipped me over to the front where I found myself on her milk-swollen breasts. [...] At night, when the sun no longer warmed me, her arms, her body, took over and, later, when I began to take interest in my surroundings, I was able to look down on them fearlessly from my lofty refuge. When sleep overtook me, I had only to shut my eyes.” Willi Maurer recounts the case of a Chilean refugee to whom he offered a pram, at the time being unaware of the importance for a child to be carried. The mother declined the offer and continued to use a large shawl to carry her baby, who never cried and made his needs known through gestures and facial expressions. Despite the difficulties of their exile, a quiet serenity surrounded the pair. Perhaps the mother was drawing on a strength resulting from her own childhood when she had the fortune to have been carried by her own mother.


When children are first introduced into the world, they discover a completely new universe where they aspire to link themselves to something familiar, like their mother's smell and the sound of her voice. The young human is by nature a parent-clinger who develops through contact with their close family circle, in particular with a mothering and protective person. Depriving newborns of these bearings may slow down their development because they may not feel safe and could lack psychomotor stimulation. Babies might bury "non digested emotions" inwardly, which will later reappear in other forms. These children will have to do interior work later on, in order to find satisfactory solutions to meet their needs, so that later they do not recreate the same emotional voids with their own children. Thus, they can attempt to meet their children's needs as best as possible. Studies concur with testimonials from people's personal experiences: body closeness, notably by carrying one's baby, satisfies the baby's essential need for sensory contact. Reassured, children can develop and progressively discover their new world.

Written by: Présence Bouvier (Managing Editor)

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