Everything Children who can no longer play with children: how to help them be well

There are still many provinces that remain in phase 0. Children living in these areas cannot play with other children skin-to-skin, something that is essential for their development. How can we fill these gaps?

If the children are not going to be able to touch each other during the de-refinement, they will need to deploy new resources for the game and they will. Because childhood is creative. But, for our part, as adults, we will also need to transform our habits and understand that we will have to compensate for this lack of childhood contact.

We have two ways of compensating for this social distance through nature and through a close family experience (to promote contact). These two measures will cushion and dissolve the stress of not being able to touch or be as close as you would need to your friends.

TO COMPENSATE FOR HIS NEED TO TOUCH: MORE FAMILY BOND

The skin is the largest organ in our body (with five million nerve endings, which are mostly located on our feet, hands and face). The area of ​​the brain responsible for processing information from our skin is also one of the largest!

As mammals that we are, contact is at the base, at the origin, of our biology. When we touch, our brain generates endorphins that relieve and soothe physical or emotional pain, body and mind.

Children need to grow up by touching and being sufficiently touched.

In the touch and on the skin with skin, our nervous system calms from the moment we are born and until the last of our days. Continual contact in childhood helps us create receptors for oxytocin (the love hormone). By touching with our hands we learn and grow internally, invisibly…

Our greatest potential as human beings unfolds only if we are held, hugged, caressed and touched a lot, if we grow glued and glued to other bodies. So if our children are going to be able to touch less with other children, at least as a family, let”s become mothers and fathers more physically available. This health crisis may be an opportunity for families to touch each other more.

• Let us intensify the hugs, massages and caresses, no matter how old our children are.
• Let”s go down to the ground, let”s make our bodies more available for our children to invade and reconquer us with theirs.

TO COUNTERACT ISOLATION AND ASEPTIC ENVIRONMENTS: MORE NATURE

During this quarantine we have been invited to be very careful with hygiene. But all creatures need a healthy and balanced daily contact with germs (viruses and bacteria) to stimulate the healthy development of their immune system or, otherwise, they are at greater risk of becoming ill and suffering from allergies, asthma or other diseases linked to the immune system. And inflammatory, in turn associated with other types of pathologies in adulthood.

I am concerned about the widespread obsession of adults to prevent their children from “getting dirty” or coming into contact with germs. It also worries me that as adults, due to our fear and confusion, we confuse childhood when going outside and accentuate their biphobia (fear and rejection of the living and natural) and favor their video philia (that sedentary passion for the virtual that favors the artificial devices). Let”s not forget:

• A childhood that is stained with nature will live its present and future more healthily as an adult. A plasticized, antiseptic childhood is clearly a bad investment in the future.
• The cleaning chemicals not only are not harmless but often are directly harmful to health.

Therefore, it is not a question of avoiding natural environments, but on the contrary, of enhancing them, preserving them, finally valuing them as the great treasure that they have always been.

In fact, scientific studies reveal that children with the most allergies and respiratory problems are precisely those furthest removed from the biological richness that contact with nature provides. In addition, close contact (not anecdotal or specific) with nature has a medicinal effect:

• It is a regulator of the nervous system that favors less stress in childhood, which will favor their emotional state at this time.
• In the natural environment, the nervous system of children relaxes and their mood improves. His behavior, which worries this society so much, is transformed. Because in nature, girls and boys are simply healthier and happier.

AND WHAT ABOUT YOUNG CHILDREN WHO INSIST ON PUTTING EVERYTHING IN THEIR MOUTHS?

Babies and children around the age of two know the world through their mouths. They have many more nerve endings in it than anywhere else. Their mouth allows them to access information about the qualities and quality of that object. They need to suck to know! It is not that they are “rude” or “dirty.” It is not that they are wrong. It is that they are wisely developing their intelligence. They know the world through that privileged place.

That is why it is so important that, instead of telling them all the time that they cannot touch or put anything in their mouth, from the understanding, we collect with them natural objects in healthy spaces (large, flat or rough shells, wooden sticks, stones of an adequate size, leaves of plants that we know are not toxic) and we allow them to live and experience this necessary stage of their development.

Perhaps until now we have mistakenly believed as a society that our creatures could fully develop in artificial environments. We have created cities where urban space is given priority and not green, where cars can park or circulate comfortably, not childhood or the rest of the world. People. But hopefully now, with this planetary crisis, we finally realize in the cities of the great treasure that these vast parks, full of trees and earth, are.

And that for the families who live closer to the forest or the sea, the river or the countryside, these continue to be safe havens where adults can relax and thus allow children to enjoy themselves again, healthily.