Touch: Our First Language of Safety, Love & Health
Introduction: Before We Had Words
Touch is one of our earliest and most fundamental human needs. Long before we understand spoken language, we experience the world through warmth, holding, movement, pressure, and physical closeness.
These early experiences contribute to physical, emotional, and psychological development, helping establish the foundations for attachment, connection, and emotional regulation.
This article explores the developmental and relational significance of touch through the work of four influential researchers: Ashley Montagu, Tiffany Field, Mary Carlson, and Nils Bergman.
Their work has helped illuminate why nurturing touch matters, what happens when responsive caregiving is absent, and how the experience of being safely held can support well-being throughout life.
Touch and the Developing Infant Nervous System
At birth, an infant's nervous system and their brain are still developing. Newborns depend on responsive caregivers to help regulate their physiological and emotional states. Holding, rocking, skin-to-skin contact, gentle touch, familiar voices, and feeding all contribute to this early process of co-regulation.
A caregiver's warm, predictable touch provides sensory information that can help an infant settle during periods of distress. Skin-to-skin contact also supports important physiological functions, including temperature regulation and cardio-respiratory stability, particularly in newborns.
Over time, repeated experiences of responsive caregiving contribute to the developing infant's capacity for emotional regulation and secure attachment.
These early relationships provide an important foundation for learning how to manage stress and seek comfort throughout life.
Touch is not the only pathway to co-regulation, but it is one of the earliest and most immediate ways a caregiver can communicate comfort, connection, and safety.
These pioneering researchers helped establish the importance of touch.
"Being touched and caressed, is food for the infant; food as necessary as minerals, vitamins and proteins."
Ashley Montagu
"The massaged infants did not eat more that the others. Their weight gain seems due to the effect of contact on their metabolism."
Dr. Tiffany Field
"Contact comfort is an essential condition for a normal development."
Dr. Mary Carlson
Ashley Montagu: The Human Significance of Touch
Ashley Montagu was an anthropologist, author and university professor whose book, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, brings together the research from multiple disciplines to discuss the significance of touch on the developing baby. He says that the earliest impressions are from the skin and the sensation of touch and has a powerful impact on healthy human development.
His is a seminal work regarding the necessity of touch for healthy human and animal development. He uses research based sources, including early studies of both human and animal subjects. His work has been repeatedly confirmed by numerous subsequent researchers.
Touching is deeply moving, highly engaging, profound and reaches your soul. It should be read by all parents and parents-to-be.
Tiffany Field: The Science of Therapeutic Touch
Tiffany Field, PhD., has a thirty year research career, having published over 400 papers and 20 books. She is the Director of the Touch Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine. She conducts research on the effects of touch and massage therapy on premature infants, postpartum depression, pain, immunity and chronic illness.
One facet of Dr. Field's research is how touch influences both body and emotions. Her research showed that touch influences infants' metabolism and how their bodies process food.
Touch or massage stimulates the vagus nerve - the massive nerve highway running from the lower brain into the gastrointestinal tract. Her research, with colleagues, found that moderate-pressure massage was associated with increased vagal activity, gastric motility and greater weight gain in premature infants
Dr. Field and her colleagues wide-ranging research has shown that touch regulates the nervous system, promotes healthy growth and healthy social bonds.
Mary Carlson: What Happens When Touch and Nurturing Are Absent?
To understand just how powerful touch is to our development, we have to look at what happens when it is entirely stripped away. In the early 1990s, Harvard neurobiologist Dr. Mary Carlson traveled to Romania to study infants in severely understaffed state orphanages. The children were fed and medically treated, but they were almost never held, rocked, or cuddled and they were socially isolated.
What Dr. Carlson discovered changed our understanding of human development forever: without tactile and social stimulation, the human body fails to thrive.
Her landmark research proved that positive touch and social interaction affects the nervous system, activates growth hormones, regulates stress, and allows us to bond with the world around us.
Dr. Carlson's research focused on how critical physical connection is for infant development. She found that when infants are socially isolated and deprived of nurturing touch, their bodies enter a state of chronic stress, caused by high cortisol levels.
Dr. Carlson's research explored the effects of severe early social deprivation among children living in Romanian institutions. Her work highlighted how the absence of consistent, responsive caregiving—including nurturing physical contact—can affect children's stress regulation, development and capacity for social connection.
These findings remind us that infants need more than adequate nutrition and medical attention. Warmth, responsive interaction, physical closeness and dependable relationships are important components of healthy development.
Gentle physical stimulation actively triggers the hormones needed for healthy weight gain and growth. Furthermore, early skin-to-skin contact releases oxytocin, which fosters a secure attachment and lays the foundation for empathy and strong future relationships.
Dr. Carlson's research had an enormous impact on how we view infant needs.
Nils Bergman: Skin-to-Skin Contact and Newborn Care
Nils Bergman is self -described as a Public Health Physician. Currently, he is a full-time researcher and advocate for kangaroo mother care (KMC). He is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Cape Town.
Currently, Dr. Bergman lectures on the interconnection between nurture-science and neuroscience. He emphasizes the newborn's need for warmth, closeness and physiological regulation.
Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is holding your baby skin-to-skin against your bare chest. Dr. Bergman says that KMC is a necessity that acts as a vital incubator for healthy infant development.
In 2004, Dr. Bergman and his colleagues compared immediate skin-to-skin contact with incubator care in low-birth-weight newborns.
The researchers found that newborn care provided by skin-to-skin contact on the mother's chest resulted in better physiological outcomes and stability than the same care provided in closed servo-controlled incubators. The infants separated from their mothers experienced cardio-respiratory instability (also called mammalian protest-despair) and hyper-arousal.
Dr. Bergman emphasizes that immediate skin-to-skin contact helps newborns regulate body temperature, stabilize heart rate and support physiological stability.
This constant closeness signals to the infant's nervous system that they are safe, shifting their energy away from survival mode and directing it toward optimal brain growth, robust immune health, and successful breastfeeding.
Embracing this approach gives babies the foundational physiological security they need to truly thrive from day one.
Safe Touch: Choice, Connection and Co-Regulation
Touch can communicate comfort and connection, but its meaning depends on the person receiving it. For someone with a history of trauma, even a well-intentioned touch may feel intrusive or activating.
Safe touch is welcomed, predictable and freely chosen. It allows the person receiving it to retain control over their own body. Whether through holding a loved one's hand, gentle massage, therapeutic touch or simply the reassuring presence of another person, the experience of safety matters as much as the physical contact itself.
Takeaway: A Language We Never Outgrow
From the earliest moments of life, nurturing touch helps us experience comfort, connection, and safety. Research continues to reveal how these experiences contribute to physiological regulation, healthy development, and emotional well-being.
As we grow, our relationship with touch changes, but our capacity to find comfort through safe human connection remains.
Touch is more than a pleasant sensation. It is one of the earliest ways we communicate love, experience belonging, and connect with one another.
Bringing Nurturing Touch Into Everyday Life
Understanding the importance of touch is one thing; incorporating it into everyday life is another. Gentle, responsive touch can become part of the ordinary moments we share with our babies, helping foster comfort, connection and bonding.
Interested in learning more about practical ways to incorporate nurturing touch into your baby's daily routine?
Explore my articles on Infant Massage Is Good for Both Mom and Baby and Infant Massage, Bonding and the Fourth Trimester
Explore More
References
Bergman, N. (2026). Kangaroula. https://kangaroomothercare.com/nino-overview/nils-bergman/
Bergman, N., Linley, L. and Fawcus, S. (2004), Randomized controlled trial of skin-to-skin contact from birth versus conventional incubator for physiological stabilization in 1200- to 2199-gram newborns. Acta Paediatrica, 93: 779-785. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1651-2227.2004.tb03018.x
Carlson, M., & Earls, F. (1997). Psychological and neuroendocrinological sequelae of early social deprivation in institutionalized children in Romania. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 807, 419–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1997.tb51936.x
Field, T. (2014). Touch (2nd ed.). Bradford Books.
Montagu, A. (1971). Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. Columbia University Press.
