Children’s touch in a Swedish preschool: touch cultures in peer group interaction

Abstract

This study examines children’s touch conduct in peer-group interaction in a Swedish preschool. Through a detailed analysis of 100 video-recorded touch episodes from everyday preschool activities, the study proposes an initial description of touch functions in children’s peer groups. The results suggest that touch was primarily used to control other children and to show affection. Both affectionate and control touch played significant roles to form and protect small social units within the larger group of children. Affectionate touch also played a central role in children’s friendship groups to establish and uphold intimate social relations. Children’s peer relations involved extended forms of touch between both boys and girls, and in mixed gender constellations. Children both initiated and received peer touch without paying these actions specific attention, and they granted others access to their whole bodies including vulnerable body parts. Children’s touch regularly occurred in parallel with other activities and was routinely not verbally topicalised as focal point of interaction. Detailed examination of touch episodes provides well-informed ground for understanding specificities of embodied conduct as socially and normatively organised children’s touch cultures.