Madhuri reconsiders the innocent-seeming act of tickling, revealing its deeper emotional and psychological layers
My mother, Devadasi, had strong, kid-centric opinions about child-rearing. Many of these flew in the face of the customs of the day. She insisted that a crying infant must be picked up and held, no matter the time of day or night or the convenience or inconvenience to its mother (fathers, unfortunately, were excused from all such things then, and even Devadasi could not blast through that wall).
If we saw a child being heavily scolded by its parent while we were out and about, she’d say, “I want to just pick that little kid up and love it and love it and love it!”
She (and my father) believed that a child should have its childhood; so should not be made to work. They both felt that they’d been expected, as children, to be mini-adults, and that this had traumatized them.
She believed that children’s creativity and all that it produced should be praised unconditionally, and indeed that the children themselves should be praised a great deal.
…And all this, amongst a complex and difficult and impoverished home life, she managed to do.
(There were limits: the time my toddler sister and I were locked in the bathroom while I was exhorting her to produce little balls of poo, to be wrapped in foil and placed on a cookie sheet: we were making Shit Cookies! Mama rapped hard and angrily on the door: “What are you girls doing in there?”)
There was one other thing she felt strongly about: tickling. In those days – and probably it is still like this – it was just generally accepted in families that children were to be tickled – attacked with wiggling fingers and lots of “Rrrr rrrr whooo whooo ha ha ha ggggggg!” sounds, and the fingers going to the ribs, stimulating nerve endings like crazy. The tickled person writhes around gasping and shrieking and laughing, and everybody laughs, and so isn’t it a great thing to do? To babies, kids, or even to your friends, as you grow a little bigger? Rough-housing, it’s called, good clean active fun, a way to show affection in a very lively, yet not overly sentimental (or emotionally exposed) way?
My mother was absolutely against it – she said it overstimulated the nervous system and could cause bed-wetting.
She was the child of a doctor and a nurse, and had worked in a childcare centre in Marin County while, as a teen, she went to UC Berkeley; I don’t know where her ideas about child care originated, but she was quite capable of coming up with them herself. In any case, in our family we did not tickle. This rule had consequences she could not have foreseen: whenever a friend of mine found out that tickling was taboo for me, they would immediately jump on me and start tickling me meanly! I found this horrendous – a violation of boundaries, a sort of rape; and I would feel helpless and indignant and weak.
Later, during the Power Group in the School of Mysticism, Wadud, hearing that I had an injunction against being tickled, sent some other participants to tickle me! I am not sure what he intended out of this – perhaps it was a way to try to crack something prissy and withdrawn in me – perhaps to take me beyond boundaries. But it did not work; I only felt angry, truly violated and betrayed. In this matter, at least, I felt that my inherited Tribal Laws were valid, and I did not want to breach them.
I’ve even had boyfriends who, finding out that I did not permit tickling, immediately had to jump on me and start doing exactly that.
Not long ago I was reading a Fostering memoir by Maggie Hartley (Who Will Love Me Now), a woman who has fostered – and written about the fostering of – more than 150 children; most of them for short periods, as the kids waited for adoptions or to be returned to their birth families; some for many years. I love those books – I’ve sometimes felt that the kids she fosters get many goodies I missed as a kid: privacy (with 7 children, our little house was overrun), an allowance, new clothes, support in navigating the world of school and other pursuits, even as their kid-hood is contained in a safe space. Ms Hartley also shares about seminars she attends along with other foster carers, where they learn new things based on scientific research. And so I was very interested to read this, about a certain family meeting she attended:
“Tickling is an interesting subject for foster carers. In our training, we’re taught not to tickle children. Tickling can be about power and control and the tickler is the one in charge. It makes the child feel powerless and they may not be able to say when they want it to stop. Tickling can also make kids lose control and it hypes them up. That was what was happening here, right in front of us. Mum was tickling them and the girls were getting more and more hyper and wound up. Bo looked like she was struggling to breathe.”
And so I felt that it was a good thing to write an article about, as the practice is so widespread; and nobody really thinks of it as a power game – but of course it is. We think of tickling as a kind of teasing; and thus harmless. But those words ‘power and control’ are important. Tickling is a subject best looked at again, with fresh eyes.
Featured image by PixelsEffect via iStock
Comments are closed.